There's a lot of comments in this thread throwing up their hands about this. That's the attitude that will let this sort of thing happen.
Bills are published like this well ahead of them even being debated so that interested parties can comment.
There's a major faction within the Conservative party that is pro privacy (e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7450627.stm), and it's also pro business. This is anti privacy and anti business. It's a winnable fight, but not if you give up at the first suggestion of a thing you don't like.
Write to MPs, say "As CEO of awesome corp I would seriously consider relocating to Berlin". That sort of thing will get attention.
-Not a massive fan of the British surveillance state?
-Want to stay in the EU?
-Enjoy low corporate tax rate of 12.5%?
-Enjoy friendly, well educated, English speaking, Pro-American people, good beer, decent music, nice quality of life, low crime and safe green natural environment?
-Want (relatively incompetent) pro-business government to butt out of your companies launch plans?
I've started putting my affairs in order in preparation to move to Ireland should Brexit actually happen. There will be massive upheaval in the UK if it goes ahead, and I'm not sure sticking around would be my preferred option.
I was born and raised in Ireland, left for Scotland about six years ago. We'll be abandoning ship if this Brexit madness proceeds.
EDIT: now that I think about it, I'm kinda looking forward to a swarm of bright Irish ex-pats returning home from Britain if the political situation goes bad, as it'd be a huge boost to the Irish economy, and would go some way to reversing the classic brain-drain Ireland has suffered from.
Well....if the SNP win a majority in the Scottish parliament in May and Scotland's electorate vote to stay in the EU in June (with a reasonably decisive majority - say 55%-in) then we're probably going to have another independence referendum within 12-18 months. I think this time Scots will vote to leave the Union (the United Kingdom) so that Scotland can remain in the EU. Polls thus far suggest that more Scots, than not, think the EU, whilst not perfect, is generally a good thing and would like to remain in the EU.
I guess what I'm saying is that if the planets align just right then you can all move your clever, canny Irish brains to Scotland instead :)
As an aside, I lived in Donegal for three years (in the middle of no-where between Letterkenny and Milford). Despite being a bit far away from all the action in Dublin, Galway and Cork, I quite liked it. Was very fortunate to see "Mr Nice" (Howard Marks) tell his story at the An Grianan in LK in ~2009, amongst other folks.
So true...I count myself as one of them......just in the process of moving home after 8 years in London. Hoping to bring the company/parts of it back to Dublin!
As a mainland European, I'm starting to root for Brexit too. The sooner we're rid of the toxic influence of England, the better. It's a shame though, as England was a huge proponent of necessary EU reform as well.
I disagree. The UK helps provide balance to prevent France/Germany agreeing in private on deals and then presenting them to the rest of us for approval. Also British instincts on some of the business side of things are very useful.
The UK is definitely a bit proponent of necessary EU reform. One significant reason behind Brexit, is that getting the EU to actually change is nigh on impossible.
As the other comments request, what is the toxic influence in your opinion?
I was mainly referring to the xenophobia expressed in the lead-up to the official campaign. It seemed to be mostly directed at Eastern Europeans, but the UK isn't exactly doing a stellar job accepting Syrian refugees either (what's the latest figure? 20,000 refugees over a five year period? That's the same figure that The Netherlands accepted just last year. Sweden admitted 4x that figure in 2015).
But the overall repressive stance towards software/technology, or the authoritarian stand-off between the MoH and NHS doctors doesn't help to raise my opinion of the UK either.
I'm from Galway originally, and I've been casually eying up the situation in anticipation of a Brexit disaster. So far I haven't seen anything outside of Dublin that's wowed me, but would love to be proven wrong.
It won't help, because the Home Office is run by paranoid authoritarians and crazies, and they keep trying to pull crap like this no matter who is in power.
The critical question is just how likely is it that the gov will prosecute Apple, Google, or FB for not following the rules.
"Not very", I'd guess.
How likely is the gov to prosecute Tiny Corp Ltd?
"8.1 Small companies (with under 10,000 users) will not be obligated to provide a permanent interception capability, although they may be obligated to give effect to a warrant."
But look at this:
"8.17 A person to whom a technical capability notice is given is under a duty to comply with the notice. In respect of a technical capability notice to give effect to equipment interference or bulk acquisition warrants, the duty to comply with a technical capability notice is enforceable against a person in the UK by civil proceedings by the Secretary of State.
The duty to comply with a technical capability notice to give effect to interception warrants and CD authorisations is enforceable against a person in the UK and a person outside the UK by civil proceedings by the Secretary of State."
That's civil proceedings, not criminal proceedings. So basically the SoS can sue, but not jail anyone.
It's all quite confused, and fundamentally fails to understand the differences between targeted surveillance, bulk surveillance, end-to-end encryption, commercial encryption for (e.g.) secure banking, open source VPNs, and so on.
If you pull apart the language, the mental model is of someone who thinks encryption is like an envelope around a letter. So if you demand a de-enveloping tool from the people who make and sell envelopes you've done your job.
There's a bit more to it, but the legal language doesn't have any insight into that.
> It won't help, because the Home Office is run by paranoid authoritarians and crazies, and they keep trying to pull crap like this no matter who is in power.
And forever pushing back is the price of freedom. OP is right, you have to keep telling them no.
I wonder how different things would be if Davis had won the Conservative party leadership. Probably as hard to tell as what might have happened if Gore had kept his presidential win.
Edit: Totally agree that if you want to help fight this then write to your MP and consider donating towards a publicity campaign by https://www.dontspyonus.org.uk.
I used to work in Westminster and Davis was one of the only Conservatives who was pro-privacy. Partly because he
a) Had a military background so wasn't intimidated by people in uniform recommending things to him. He was aware as anyone with military service of the crap that the military often push.
b)He had spent time over seeing parts of the intelligence budget, so was very sceptical of the things they were pushing and their effectiveness.
In both Russia and China you find more "synergy" between private companies and state. There wouldn't be need for pass legislation because a company refusing to cooperate would be promptly "educated".
In the western countries there is less synergy and more dispute. So they need to legislate for the law abiding organizations to become "outlawed" at some point for doing what is the ethically correct thing to do.
These laws WILL affect UK tech start-ups if privacy has anything to do with their business model.
I have said so in the past, don't register your tech startups in the UK. Boycott is sometimes an effective means for change. UK law makers know this could back-fire, they are taking a gamble they have already lost.
Do we just end up in a state where the idea of a 'firm' has to radically change?
It feels like the ultimate endgame of all of this is either that the technology industry just freezes (because innovation is killed by bureaucracy), or that we end up in some cryptopunk space in which the only interesting stuff happens over Tor/Freenet/whatever else.
And of course, the latter becomes harder every day with hardware backdoors.
I think that fundamentally the idea of the state regulating commerce is flawed.
Individuals want to be able to make choices, but at the moment they can't because economics forces their hand. Apart from a few radicals, everyone has to use a car, has to use the subway with its' smart card, has to use their mobile phone for business, because otherwise society doesn't have a role for you any more.
Can UBI help here? Or are we really just doomed to basically disable the Internet we created because it's too powerful?
Logically, there has to follow a law that forbids using hardware, software, or anything else for that matter, that wasn't built in accordance to the new rules. So go dig up grandpa's type writer and slide rule...
Doubt they even see it that way. And the industry won't be killed. Like with drugs, it will simply be driven underground. An astute startup will register an offshore company and develop locally. And then there's the rise of remote working which makes staying legal even easier.
"Any company with operations in the UK -- including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, which have submitted written evidence calling on the British lawmakers to revise the bill -- would have to comply with the rules."
Idea: Create a company who's explicit purpose is to create and submit billions of iterations of the same software for their auditing purposes which horrifically unreadable/obfuscated code that completely swamps whatever agency is responsible for the process, and effectively DoSes them until literally nobody can release software at all.
Sounds like 1984 coming closer and closer each day.
I wonder however about the negative consequences to the tech industry, why would a company purchase a service they can not trust anymore due to weak encryption?
They government probably also will miss their target completely as criminals/ terrorists etc will simply choose other products and services.
We're really living in the age of overreaching surveillance. Law makers seem rabid and unable to consider reason: Just because surveillance is possible, it also has to be taken to the very top. They cover their asses while ruining everything else in the process.
Indeed. Won't be buying British at all from now on. In fact, I'm putting UK on my blacklist of places to go, and places to buy from/invest in.
Sorry Brits. You are letting your state fall into absolutel disaster. I'm putting you in the same bag as North Korea, now - your state cannot be trusted one bit.
I am in middle Europe, in the sort of country where the lessons of these sorts of shenanigans are not, generally, over-ignored by the general populace at large, and the citizenry indeed feels genuinely responsible for not letting these apparat re-emerge as a means of social control.
Alas there are generations and generations of Westerners - after all, we are stateless here in the HN frame - who are, moreover, completely willing to overlook the crimes of their state and just let it all happen, "for whatever reason". This is why I, also, choose not to ever live in the US. (It is the only reason: that I chose not to.)
Members of states currently erecting apparatus of human social control, with explicit intent to violate human rights of any individual, no matter their non-/statehood, need to do one thing to change it all: move. Keep moving. Abandon your culture, and acclimate to a new one. Repeat, ad inf.
300,000+ people a year emigrate from Britain. What number is required to "change it all"? Have you experienced a revolution of any kind? Studied revolutions in detail perhaps? I haven't, but I do live in the UK.
Perhaps you believe if we just voted for the other party, everything will change? It's so much bigger than that.
That might be going a bit far. I was more saying that if firms have to go through all that red tape then there is just no way that they will be able to compete against countries that have technology bases that don't have this level of red tape.
You'll not be buying tech invented in the UK because there won't be much if any new tech developed in the UK!
There won't be any reason for UK tech companies to do anything, because nobody is going to be buying that tech if it means its usage will be usurped by the UK government for their own means. This assumed power - indeed, entirely imperial - of possession over items of trade means that you won't, actually, ever be able to buy something "from the UK". You'll be actually leasing it "From the Uk Gov't".
That is rather a huge show-stopper, for rather a lot of industry. Ownership matters.
The purpose of disclosing technology before release is so that the UK Gov't can plan and assess attack/intrusion measures before it becomes a mainstream/wide-spread product.
Don't be so naive to think this is just an 'administrative procedure'. This is the UK Gov't - and its Customers - putting in the procedure for subverting any technology it wants.
Yeah, that's not good. However, what's to stop the UK government from doing this after the product is released?
But yes, that sounds like one of the reasons they want the legislation. However, I think a stronger motivation is that they want to force the company to weaken their security and/or add a backdoor for government enforcement. So yeah, I wouldn't be buying any product from the UK that has anything to do with security.
First thought was that people would protest this by flooding the relevant department with product updates, maybe triggered on each commit. Then I noticed the caveats:
- Updates don't count: only significantly large changes need disclosing.
- Can't be forced on companies with fewer than 10,000 users. Maybe commercially led open source products could claim that users are spread across many forks each with fewer users.
- New product disclosures only applies to communications companies already forced to backdoor existing products. Maybe we'll see companies akin to Alphabet evading the need to backdoor new products by forming separate companies.
Overall I'm more worried by
the requirement to backdoor communications than having to disclose new services. Security shouldn't be sacrificed. Additionally the gagging order would prevent companies from being honest with their users as well as making it harder for them to fight against it.
So the UK intelligence wants the capability provided by the Echelon surveillance network back?
It's actually not as chilling in the sense that this would be nothing new - rather, I'm sure the spooks are grieving the fact that people are moving to secure technologies.
I'm pretty sure that before the internet no envelope or phone call was inaccessible.
This is quickly shaping up to be another "War on Drugs"... It's hard to determine whether UK lawmakers actually think bills like this will make them more secure, or if it's just one incremental move in a long term strategy to remove any assurance of privacy.
Either way the UK gov is looking highly incompetent.
And I thought the character of 'C' in the Spectre(2015 film) was a bit over the top. How silly I was, the fact that it culminated only on one character was actually a massive understatement
Absolutely. The fact that it's a crackbrained idea won't stop law makers. To quote a sentence I once heard: “It's the law, reason doesn't enter into it”.
You had better not get caught using the wrong browser in the U.K.!
Bills are published like this well ahead of them even being debated so that interested parties can comment.
There's a major faction within the Conservative party that is pro privacy (e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7450627.stm), and it's also pro business. This is anti privacy and anti business. It's a winnable fight, but not if you give up at the first suggestion of a thing you don't like.
Write to MPs, say "As CEO of awesome corp I would seriously consider relocating to Berlin". That sort of thing will get attention.