The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1].
Diffie just started by explaining that cybersecurity is all about securing some asset from threats such that the cost of attack was too great given the value of the asset. How do you protect the store that has all the cryptographic keys in the entire United Kingdom? It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. Government dude was totally out of his depth and the bill was eventually dropped.
[1] Turing award winner and the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman. Fair to say he's a guy who knows a thing or two about cryptography.
If you're referring to the Electronic Communications Bill, it did indeed become an act. And in fact it contained an explicit section prohibiting the imposition of escrow (which has not been removed by any subsequent amendments): https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/7/part/III
14 Prohibition on key escrow requirements
(1) Subject to subsection (2), nothing in this Act shall confer any power on any Minister of the Crown, on the Scottish Ministers, on the National Assembly for Wales or on any person appointed under section 3—
(a) by conditions of an approval under Part I, or
(b) by any regulations or order under this Act,
to impose a requirement on any person to deposit a key for electronic data with another person.
The debate on key escrow raged for some time. Foremost among the original proponents of key escrow was my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor). However, the debate has moved on—as has my hon. Friend, who has changed his mind because we have learned much more about the matter. All credit is due to him for that.
It was thus crucial that key escrow should not be included in the Bill. There would be no power for the Government, or for some agency, to demand that the key—as between public and private—for the de-encryption of material could be deposited with a third party. However, we were concerned that key escrow might be introduced through the back door.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Taylor_(British_politician... : appears to be the now almost vanished old school type of conservative. Member of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, so at least knows some tech people. Europhile, to the extent of quitting the party over Brexit. Pro-space exploration. Anti-Iraq-war.
Surely you are aware how rare it is for people to admit that they are wrong? If you take social consequences into account it's not even irrational for people to resist having to do that. Especially for politicians! So yes, he should be given credit for it.
That the key escrow portion was finally dropped is not somehow incompatible with it being there in the first place. Maybe your comment is just trying to clarify the timeline--due to a pedantic complaint that if a bill is changed to not do something it isn't the entire bill that was "dropped"--but it frankly is coming off like some kind of attempt to gaslight the thread down a path of "this was never a concern and no one was suggesting this".
> frankly is coming off like some kind of attempt to gaslight the thread down a path of "this was never a concern and no one was suggesting this".
I mean, I literally quoted an MP saying "The debate on key escrow raged for some time" and linked to the full debate in which it was spoken; hardly a sensible "escrow was never a concern" move. The Telepolis link backs this up with detail - escrow was proposed by the Tories, pledged against yet initially retained by Labour, and eventually withdrawn.
The comment to which I was replying said that an entire bill was junked. I think it's much more interesting, and indeed important, to note that in actuality the act passed with an explicit prohibition of escrow. If the bill was dropped then it would likely have been a case of the govt going, oh, damn, we got embarrassed - kill it for now, we'll come back to it later, but bury it under something else. But no - there was public debate, and democracy functioned as we would all hope - a terrible idea was proposed, defeated, and legislated against.
> UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie
Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased.
These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and they have been instead been given some generic independent sounding job title.
I'm not joking! BBC Radio 4 famously recently did a "Brexit anniversary programme". Three people in the studio, the presenter and two guests. The two guests were .... Theresa Villiers and Daniel Hannan, two hardcore Brexteers who, of course, spent the entire interview session fighting completely unchallenged over who could give the most sycophantic sunlit-uplands view of Brexit.
The BBC certainly has a lot of problems with regard to actual independence, but I would like to *ahem* provide some balance by pointing to the satirical popular news quiz "Have I Got News For You" which spent the early part of the Blair years having to beep out certain references to Peter Mandelson — the Dominic Cummings of his era — that only ended with (from memory):
???: "Peter Mandelson is a hom… owner"
Regular guest: "Why can't gay people own homes?"
Host: "Well, new Director General, let's see if that goes out."
At the time, and I'm pleasantly amazed how fast this has changed, being gay and in charge was still mildly scandalous in the eyes of tabloids, and that was about the same time the age of consent was equalised.
However such (entirely valid) reasons for respecting privacy should be for all, but as far as I remember Mandelson was the only person who got to keep that particular secret.
Conversely, right after the referendum someone said the BBC should play "God Save The Queen" at the end of the day's programming in concordance with the departure from the EU, and Newsnight responded with this, which is still up on their official channel: https://youtu.be/WwsQ_5Wm4oo
The BBC don't seem to care about being impartial when it comes to the royalty. They publish loads of articles about the upcoming coronation and I have yet to see any republican points of view.
They don't care about impartiality in anything, really. Certainly not since Greg Dyke left. The management has increasingly been stuffed with people who are openly Tory.
The recent attack on Gary Lineker for not being "impartial" (not being sufficiently uncritical of Government policy) was particularly galling.
Campbell is IMO the more appropriate comparison too - Mandelson was an elected MP and later a Lord during Blair/Brown years, he wasn't a SPAD for hire like Cummings or Campbell. That said, the three of them worked very closely together - Blair, Mandelson and Campbell.
I'm sorry, but we'd be a hell of a lot worse off without the BBC.
For all its flaws, it does a huge amount of good. All reporting will inevitably hold a bias simply because selection of story for time scheduled news will _always_ involve excluding other news items.
The amount of criticism the BBC recieves is significant, and it's gone up a lot more recently.
I think it's a reflection of the incumbent gov more than the state of the organisation. There are strong forces working against the BBCs more egalitarian aims.
No one has a problem with the BBC existing. Just that it is de facto a state funded and government affiliated news agency.
One of the funnier stories supporting this is that MI5 had to ask the BBC to stop sending everyone for vetting because it was unnecessary!
> when MI5 suggested scaling back the number of jobs subject to vetting, the BBC argued against such a move.
Something the BBC lied about repeatedly and only admitted years after other news agencies broke the story.
Now it's run by the guy who was the PMs boss and who organised a loan for the last PM. And people claims it's totally independent? These sound like stories about RT.
> Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased.
I'm curious, around when do you think that changed? And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?
> I'm curious, around when do you think that changed?
The smell of change appeared more clearly in the run-up to Brexit. Certainly post-Brexit I would say it is very much evident.
> And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?
To be clear (as per my Radio 4 example cited above), it is not necessarily a case of "reported on / did not report on", it is frequently more a case of bias / lack of impartiality, again as nicely exemplified by my "two hardcore Brexiteers fight over Brexit" example[1].
However, I could also give you many examples of "reported on/did not report on". Perhaps one of the most well known is Lady Mone of House of Lords fame. She is/was subject to various investigations regarding supply of PPE during CoVID.
For a long time, Lady Mone's investigations were widely reported in all mainstream media (tabloids, broadsheets, other mainstream TV/Radio news ... you name the place, it was reported there).
But the BBC ? Nope. No mention on TV/Radio news, and for a long time a search for "Mone" on the BBC News website yielded exactly zero results.
Even today although you can now find a small number of mentions on the BBC website, you'll have to go looking on other mainstream sources for the actual detail.[2]
Regardless of the fine detail about who knew what at what time, history has vindicated people who were skeptical about the claims being made to provoke the invasion of Iraq, and it was not right of the Blair government to attempt to suppress them.
(Mind you, the BBC has never been really able to report on the security state; see the Troubles, or the Zircon Affair)
i worked for the BBC for several years back in the 80s, in computer services radio (basically designing and writing applications to support radio broadcasts) and it really has always been a crowd of right-wing arse lickers. the "talent" may appear to be slightly left-of-centre, but the management certainly is not.
No doubt you've dispassionately gone out of your way to assesss that evidence and after detailed examination decided it's invalid. Which would be a perfectl reasonable step to make - if that's what you did. Did you?
Yes, but it's an argument that just goes round and round forever. Conservatives think the BBC is run by a left-wing cabal. Leftists think it's an establishment mouthpiece run by the Tories. We've been having exactly the same argument since the 1960s.
The Chair, DG, and other higher-ups will almost always have either Labour or Tory connections, because those are the two main political parties. You'd be hard pushed to find a suitable candidate that wasn't connected at a high level. I suppose the tell is whether people who are up in arms about Tory Richard Sharp were similarly upset when Labour-supporting Michael Lyons or Gavyn Davies were chairman, or when Labour-supporting Mark Thompson, etc were DG.
Ironic considering we have things now like gmail, and god knows how many services
you could get access to via password resets if you could get access to all the emails. Or CI systems for another example
> It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target.
While I understand what you mean, there are already keys which are "infinitely valuable": root CA keys. If you have those, you can essentially impersonate anyone. Therefore, we must have ways to protect these sort of keys.
That being said, a root CA key is probably locked up on an air gapped machine vs some machine which actively using the key to scan through traffic.
Mainly pointing out here that the idea of value vs cost has to have some point at which we protect it regardless of the value because thats how the hierarchy of trust works in our CA system.
> If you have those, you can essentially impersonate anyone.
Once. This would be immediately detected through Certificate Transparency and there would be front-page headlines around the world about the chaos that ensued as vendors issued a critical update blocking that CA certificate.
Escrow compromise as described has a iserial systems failure probability wheres today with root keyts it's parallel. That's weakest link vs isolated/partitioned.
CAs have been nuked on occasion without much fanfare to everyday users.
The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
The intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have collaborated extensively since WWII (this is the so called "Five Eyes"[1]) and of course the NATO powers coordinate defense as well as part of that organization.
Edit to add: I mention the five eyes because cryptography (and cybersecurity) tend to fall into the purview of the signals intelligence agencies in government, so that would be NSA in the US, GCHQ in the UK etc. They collaborate under this arrangement.
The fact that we regard as "democratic" (because they are good guys, or so we'd wish) a country with king and lords (even a House of Lords, or even "Lords Spiritual" [1]), is the greater joke.
I’m sorry but this is a very simplistic take. The King has no meaningful power at all, MPs have power over the Lords and they are democratically elected.
I’m not for a second saying the system is wonderful and beyond reproach. But suggesting it’s equivalent to an autocracy or something is just flat out wrong. If you want to complain about the U.K. political system complain about first past the post or the creeping anti-democratic forces pushing things like voter ID laws. The House of Lords and the King aren’t anything comparatively.
It was just a quick quip how we regard as "democratic" a country (?) called "United Kingdom", language is funny like that.
Sure, UK is a great place to live for many of their citizens, and a great country overall, culture and so forth. It's not for nothing we are speaking their language and not Esperanto or something. But it's not a democracy, and that is fine.
If you ask me (I know you didn't, but just in case), not even the Nordic countries or Switzerland pass the main test of democracy: not being able to vote for everything, but being able to vote "No" to anything and everything. That should probably be the hallmark of a democracy. Even the toga-wearing Greeks did not have democracy to such an extent.
In an ideal world, every ballot would have as a first option the option "No". I said in some other HN comment [1], a second point would be to tie the duration of the mandate to the voter turnout, if 30% vote, then the mandate is not 100%, but 30% also of the 4/5 years mandate.
The problem is that people are very bad at assessing what is in their best interest. For sure, the result is a pretty thorny ethical debate, but you can't deny that the ability of the electorate to veto things would not necessarily result in an improvement.
In general I believe people are bad at assessing their best interest as a failure of education (too few teachers, too many students), perhaps with the rise of personal artificial mentors this will be better.
Being able to vote "No" or "No One" may see no improvement, but it would at least give a true option to the 30%-60% of people (various countries) who never vote, a protest vote which is actually significant, especially if voting "No" further decreases the mandate time.
I guess in general we should ask ourselves if the principles on which we build the society are for increasing democracy or for decreasing it. And then we can label it as "democratic" or not, but the rate of change towards a heightened democracy is more important than a single scalar "democracy index". Hence my initial repartee about a 1,300 old society which steadfastly had and has bishops, lords, kings as instruments of power or power-adjacent implementers of power.
I am afraid it's rather original. Afraid since originality in politics increases the chance of assassination, or even worse, marginalization.
One technical issue to solve beforehand is reducing the cost of elections by 6-7 orders of magnitude. 2020 US election costed $14 billion (presidential and congressional) [1], 2020 India election costed $7 billlion [2]. It's completely unsustainable. Sending 500 million HTTPS messages using Amazon SES costs around $50,000. Perhaps elections should cost a bit more, but not with much, in order to be able to run them every other day/month.
The fact that our societies are unable to hold elections often and at the cost of spam emails is also a sign we are not trending towards increasing democracy.
The king has veto power over any acts he believes affects him, and him and the queen have apparently used the threat of this many times in order to shape UK legislation before it's argued on. Apparently almost all legislation is passed by the royal family's office for edits before it goes up for debate.
If you read the article, they practically exercise those rights up through the current day. The PM's office runs nearly all proposed legislation by them and makes changes to acts before they go up for debate. Acts have changed from threats of using the royal consent at least as recently as 2021, but it's hard to get complete numbers as most of this process happens in secret.
This is all outlined in the previous citation I gave.
Because getting millions of pounds from the state every year [1], having massive media attention, having the ear of international leaders in politics, and having ones face on currency, sounds pretty impactful to me, especially given the fact that all this is conferred by being born to certain parents, and not by, say, something like an election.
It's so much more complicated that this. In modern times the UK monarch fulfils the role of an apolitical leader of the UK and commonwealth nations.
Just imagine for a moment if the PM was head of state... Who would be leader of commonwealth? Liz Truss? Boris Johnson? Can you see how this would cause conflict? Having a heredity apolitical monarch works really well in the context of a commonwealth of nation. Electing someone would introduce politics and that isn't feasible when you need someone who can represent such a diverse range of views.
I also think the UK monarch serves as a unifying voice for the UK. No matter our political differences we can still all turn to the monarch as voice of unity for the nation during difficult times. I think this lack of an apolitical leader is quite noticeable in the US and other nations.
I don't like all of the tradition and baggage that comes with the Royal Family and I think they would benefit from trying to modernise their public perception, but I do think there is value in having an heredity head of state with very limited powers. I think the question really is how much we should be spending on that. At the moment it does seem a bit excessive...
In this context by "meaningful power" I mean "ability to override democracy".
I'm not saying the Royal Family are not impactful (I'm certainly not defending them at all!) but I'm specifically refuting the notion that the presence of a King means that the country is not democratic. Kim Kardashian has millions, draws massive media attention and in all honesty could probably have the ear of international leaders. None of that means she can override what US voters do.
> if a voter ID is free and requires no effort on the citizens part
That alone is a big "if". Getting an ID rarely requires no effort. But the bigger question above all that is why do it anyway? Why do anything to make it harder to vote? There is little to no evidence of voter fraud taking place in the UK (or US for that matter), certainly never on a scale that would come close to affecting the outcome of an election. Every time the number of people who would be unable to vote (even just because they've lost their ID) eclipses the number of fraudulent votes that would supposedly be caught.
I think a lot of non-Brits hear "House of Lords" and think you have to have been born in a castle with a coat of arms. Whilst that may be true in the case of the hereditary peers (which are the minority in the HoL), there are also Life Peers. Some of these are ex/failed politicians, but some are appointed on the basis of their eminence in their field [1] or public works [2]
I know, I just like long hereditary lines [1]: if those don't show what power is, then I don't know what power is. Being hoi polloi myself, I barely know who my grandparents were, not to speak of their parents.
Christopher Plunkett, 1st Baron of Dunsany (1410–1463)
Richard Plunkett, 2nd Baron of Dunsany (died c. 1480)
John Plunkett, 3rd Baron of Dunsany (died 1500)
Edward Plunkett, 4th Baron of Dunsany (died 1521)
Robert Plunkett, 5th Baron of Dunsany (died 1559)
Christopher Plunkett, 6th Baron of Dunsany (died 1564)
Patrick Plunkett, 7th Baron of Dunsany (died 1601)
Christopher Plunkett, 8th Baron of Dunsany (died 1603)
Patrick Plunkett, 9th Baron of Dunsany (1595–1668)
Christopher Plunkett, 10th Baron of Dunsany (died 1690)
Randall Plunkett, 11th Baron of Dunsany (died 1735)
Edward Plunkett, 12th Baron of Dunsany (1713–1781)
Randall Plunkett, 13th Baron of Dunsany (1739–1821)
Edward Wadding Plunkett, 14th Baron of Dunsany (1773–1848)
Randall Edward Plunkett, 15th Baron of Dunsany (1804–1852)
Edward Plunkett, 16th Baron of Dunsany (1808–1889)
John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853–1899)
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878–1957)
Randal Arthur Henry Plunkett, 19th Baron of Dunsany (1906–1999)
Edward John Carlos Plunkett, 20th Baron of Dunsany (1939–2011)
Randal Plunkett, 21st Baron of Dunsany (born 1983)
Out of interest, I googled the last chap in the list [1]. Class/socio-economic privilege is very much a thing, but he's not quite the Jacob Rees-Mogg type you might expect. Also "The current heir to his title is his younger brother, Oliver, a games designer and programmer who lives in the US." - he probably has a login on here :-)
And to the point, Rees-Mogg was elected. Misguided they might be, but a majority of those who voted in his constituency (yup, not just a plurality, a majority) picked Rees-Mogg. For better or worse that's democracy for you.
Real power doesn't quite follow like that. I'm reminded of how Eastenders actor Danny Dyer found he was a descendant of King Edward III.
Real power flows through those who've maintained their assets, e.g. Duke of Devonshire; those who own the media, e.g. Viscount Rothermere; and just buying your way in, like Baron Lebedev, son of former KGB oligarch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Lebedev
Don't worry, the Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax-es maintained their assets. There was even a bit of a hullabaloo, not too much, when it was discovered that Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax "still owns and grows sugar on the same Drax Hall Estate in Barbados that made the family's fortune. Over 200 years, 30,000 slaves died at this and the other Drax plantations, according to Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Chair of CARICOM's Reparations Commission. 'The Drax family has done more harm and violence to the black people of Barbados than any other', he said." [1]
The key word in "liberal democracy" is "liberal", not "democracy". There exists only a single political system - an oligarchy. When the oligarchs decide to be nice, we call that "democracy".
Not saying this applies to you, but generally when I see someone espousing this opinion online, they are about to endorse a country who literally has a single king-like ruler, who will throw you in jail if you speak ill about them
"citation needed" I certainly agree that there is really only oligrachy everywhere, and I certainly do not think any individual hero ruler would be better.
The statement only observed a bad thing. It did not advocate or even hint at some other bad thing as a proposed solution.
Putting words into someone else's mouth is worse even than whatever they might have said if they had actually said it.
It's an actual wrondoing that you did vs a fabricated wrongdoing you accused someone else of doing.
> But I would ask you this - when you are jailed for speaking, would it be of some comfort to know that the decision to jail you was decided by 100 politicians instead of 1?
I realize this comment was written 5 minutes after yours, so you had no way of knowing, it is amusing how quickly the parent turned out to be right.
That comment turns out to have been wrong after all. So, tell me more about being amused.
They weren't saying that democracy is bad, or that anything else is better, they were saying that it (largely) doesn't exist.
I think the point was not to say that authoritarianism or anything else would be better, but simply to say that in order to get a useful result from judging something, you have to judge what it actually is, not something you imagine.
Oligarchy is probably just an inevitable emergent property of any collection of cells each exhibiting the human condition. No one is saying that it's good or roght, just that it is the actual state of things, where democracy as we were told to imagine it in school, is largely a fantasy. A nice one, and surely the direction we should always aim, but not what is or realistically ever will be.
The point as I see it, is only to point out that when trying to decide what to do, and how to interpret the results of what has been done, there is a difference between the direction you push, the ideals you want, and how far you have or even ever possibly can get, how much of those ideals you have been striving for you actually have, regardless what labels are on things or what they tell everyone in school and on tv.
If you want to judge something, and have a useful result, you have to know correctly what you are actually judging. IE: it's misleading your own self as well as others to imagine that various outcomes and current conditions are the result of democracy, no matter what country you are in. In all cases, regardless what label is on the tin, it is really the result of oligrachy. (or at least to some large degree, and at least so I percieve that comment to be saying, and at least so I am saying myself)
Aiming for democracy is still probably better than not. Not because it demonsteably produces better outcomes, but because at least on paper there is some chance for it's nominal purpose. A paper declaration of agency is better than none at all.
I'm a bit confused, how is the quoted part from my comment relevant here? I'm a liberal and as such, I don't "endorse a country who literally has a single king-like ruler, who will throw you in jail if you speak ill about them"
So your comment is unfounded and useless, in other words.
One can point out that liberal democracies are heavily liberal and only somewhat democratic without committing to endorsing any other kind of government or regime, ya know.
(A common statist fallacy: assuming that some criticism of an existing type of government must imply that they are rooting for another kind of government. Not saying that this applies to you, though!)
Don't worry, I'm not interested in prescribing any ideology. I think the world is alright and isn't in need of saving. But I would ask you this - when you are jailed for speaking, would it be of some comfort to know that the decision to jail you was decided by 100 politicians instead of 1?
edit: re-reading your comment, I think (mistakenly perhaps) you were suggesting that I support Russia. I would like to clarify that I most certainly do not.
The king doesn’t really have any power in practice, I think the royal family mainly exist for tradition/tourism reasons at this point
At least according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index it’s one of the most democratic countries at 18th in the world (to be fair that’s made by a UK company but I don’t see why they would be biased)
> The [monarch] doesn’t really have any power in practice
Entirely untrue. The monarch has a weekly meeting with the Prime Minister. There have been many cases of the Queen getting carveouts, influencing laws, and vetting bills. There is no law forbidding the monarch from not granting Royal Assent. This notion that the British monarch has no power is an absolute farce.
There’s also the whole concept of King’s Consent, wherein the King gets to vet every single bill for affect the crown's own prerogatives or interests, and negotiate secretly with the government to change the contents of that bill. The Guardian articles detail this process as well. If you seriously believe the King has no power in practice I have a bridge to sell you.
'There is no law forbidding the monarch from not granting Royal Assent'. True but I await the day that happens! The Brits don't go in for revolution but there'd be all hell to pay if this occurred. It would likely mark the beginning of the end for the House of Windsor. Anti-monarchists should hope such a thing comes to pass.
There's no need to speculate, the reason we say Parliament is sovereign is that Parliament ordered Charles I executed for defying them. The King is replaceable, status as Monarch of the United Kingdom is something its Parliament can bestow.
Turns out that people who hate fun (Puritans) are even less popular than a King who keeps starting wars, so Parliament installed a replacement King.
> There’s no need to speculate, the reason we say Parliament is sovereign is that Parliament ordered Charles I executed for defying them.
Refusal of Royal Assent has happened since then, and not caused similar responses, though (in England; parts of British North America are…a different story; no regicide of course, but the monarchy itself was replaced.)
Yup, the government absolutely can "advise" the monarch to do whatever they want as we saw in that other sub-thread. If the monarch refuses such "advice" they can be replaced, I doubt Parliament would go to all the extraordinary bother to execute a modern King, especially over such small beans - but if the King won't go they can either abolish the monarchy (it wouldn't even be that unpopular to do so right now) or just replace them anyway, passing a law which says actually no, that's not the King, this other person is monarch now.
Most recently Assent was withheld from a law passed in Scotland, on the advice of the British government. This conflict makes sense, the Scottish Parliament is necessarily subsidiary, and this was basically a Culture War law, in my opinion the Scottish were on the right side of history, but it's not astonishing that (as conceived when the Scottish Parliament was set up) the British parliament could say "No".
Before that the last time assent (as opposed to consent) was refused in 1708 is genuinely interesting. It was used because of unfortunate timing. Parliament said OK, those Scots seem useful, we don't fully trust them but we need more armed men and nobody doubts they can fight, so here's a law arming the Scottish. And then, with the Bill passed but Assent not yet granted, they received news of a French Fleet landing in Scotland. Suddenly giving arms to the Scottish seemed less clever as who knows if they'd be on France's side. So Mary was told (by the Government) to withhold Assent from that bill.
> True but I await the day that happens! The Brits don’t go in for revolution but there’d be all hell to pay if this occurred.
Probably not if, as was the case the last time it happened (in 1708), it was because of what was perceived as a radical change of relevant circumstance in between the law being passed and the expected date of royal assent.
(Of course, refusal of royal assent to colonial laws in North America did happen after that, without that reason, and did cause, or at least contribute to, a revolution in those colonies.)
As all executive power is legally reposed in the Crown, the role of commander-in-chief is the only constitutional means by which decisions are made over the deployment and disposition of the Canadian Armed Forces.[6] Under the Westminster system's conventions of responsible government, the cabinet—which advises the sovereign or his viceroy on the exercise of the executive powers—generally exercises the Crown prerogative powers relating to the Canadian forces.[6][7] Still, all declarations of war are issued with the approval, and in the name, of the monarch and must be signed by either the sovereign or the governor general, as was done with the proclamation that declared Canada at war with Nazi Germany, issued on September 10, 1939; it stated: "Whereas by and with the advice of Our Privy Council for Canada, We have signified Our Approval for the issue of a Proclamation in the Canada Gazette declaring that a State of War with the German Reich exists and has existed in Our Dominion of Canada as and from the tenth day of September, 1939."
It’s concerning to think of some sort of major constitutional crisis taking place during wartime due to disagreement between PM and King. I’m a little baffled that this has never been framed as a national security issue, at least it hasn’t been a popular narrative in my lifetime.
At the same time, whatever government opens that particular Pandora’s box is in for a hell of a ride, so I understand why.
I'm obviously an abolitionist but I would be much less worried about this if the powers matched the role. I'm sure HN could empathise better than most websites that giving a supposed read-only user unused, powerful permissions is probably not the best idea.
Bare in mind that the other reason noone wants to open that Pandora's box is that in reality the monarchy's interference is relatively minor and the political establishment (with full backing of the public) would permanently shut down any attempts to interfere in a more major way.
That's not too say that the guardians findings aren't troubling or that the powers the UK monarchy do wield aren't antidemocratic. But they're only ignored because they're relatively minor.
In the case of something major like a national security incident they'd be overruled and potentially trigger the dissolution or atleast severe weakening of the monarchy. They're aware of that fact and thus careful about what they do.
If you're not familiar with how the British constitution works, this stuff can be confusing. But "The bill sought to transfer the power to authorise military strikes against Iraq from the monarch to Parliament" actually means "transfer the power from the PM to Parliament so that Parliament gets a vote." Command of the military is a royal prerogative executive power that is exercised by the Prime Minister, not the Monarch.
You need to learn to read. I am stating that the monarch has the power to veto legislation, not that the power was used in opposition to the advice of ministers.
That you don't see an issue with democratic debate being shutdown on the advice of a government minister to the monarch is another issue.
You're quoting royal prerogative, which is held by the government, specifically by the prime minister, who has to have the support of the house of commons, and aside from Alec Douglass Home for a period of 20 days in recess has always been a member of the house of commons for over a century.
> The king doesn’t really have any power in practice
No, even aside from soft power, the monarch has some hard power (which can serve as a powerful lever for soft power, as well). Notably, for instance, the requirement for Monarch’s consent (not just the more pro forma Royal Assent) to legislation affecrtng the hereditary revenues, personal property or personal interests of the Crown or the Duchy of Lancaster or Cornwall, including the Royal Household and the Royal Palaces (including the Palace of Westminster), the Crown Estate and the Crown Estate Commissioners, the Monarch's private estates, and the Monarch's interest as a landlord or an employer.
Do they lobby much? I vaguely remember a bunch of silliness about trying to figure out the Queen’s preferences around Brexit based on the brooch she was wearing or something like that…
I’ve always just thought of royalty as sort of like the prototype for American celebrities like the Kardashians. Just a bunch of people who are famous for being famous.
Ooh they lobby indefatigably. The king has a weekly meeting with the prime minister to harangue him, a privilege for which that other lobbyists pay millions a year in party donations. And then there is King's consent, where the Windsors get to secretly modify or shoot down laws that don't give them enough special privileges...
I'm just not sure that "rich person lobbies government" is the jackpot that republicans think it is. The day that Biden, Trump. Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush I and before don't get lobbying on a regular basis from major donors then I'll consider it one.
Indeed I'd rather Charlie spend an hour a week lobbying Sunak as it takes an hour of lobbying away from anyone else.
I guess the question is would an elected head of state mean more lobbying from more corrupt people. Sure Charlie might lobby against something happening in his back yard, and that's a pain, but I'd rather that than have big pharma lobby to loosen safety features on drug approvals, or big food lobby to bypass animal welfare
Hard to say, I guess. The US is a bit weird (pretty big, lots of huge companies call us home) so it probably gets more lobbying than most other countries I guess. I’d expect the UK to have a trajectory more like similar sized European countries (Germany maybe? Maybe compare to France, but of course French people have a unique relationship with their government…)
Yes, you've pointed out some of the ways in which the UK is not democratic, and many would like that to change. Democracy is not a 0 or 1 thing, it is a scale.
There is statistically a good chance you are from the US, which has no concept of Lords, but which has its own very serious shortcomings.
Very much not from US. Just pointed out a hypocrisy of our language. As an aside, US has lords as well, perhaps even more powerful than UK lords, they just go by other names: Supreme Court judges, some Senators [1], some CEOs, and the like.
I don't know why this of all your comments is downvoted. The US Supreme Court is quite strongly analogous to life peers, in that they get to make legislative and even super-legislative decisions while being lifetime political appointees. And, it appears, accepting gifts.
The sore points were hit right in the sore, so to speak. I am guessing the founder/CEO-as-dictator aspect is also not very welcoming. It's quite telling: how could a society be democratic if some of its most (if not the most) important aspects, the lifecycles of companies, are fundamentally non-democratic. I should know, I own 3 (not profitable, but that's another matter) companies on 2 continents.
I liked how the Netflix series The Crown depicted Queen Elizabeth II as having God's ear, as a last line of defense against corrupt politicians. The prime minister has to run everything past the king/queen, which hopefully keeps the system honest, or at least in line with tradition.
There's nothing like that in the US, by design, due to our constitutional separation of church and state. The words "In God We Trust" were added to our currency in 1864, and "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
Although I think we'd benefit from having an ELI5 branch to provide a final sniff test by voters for all controversial legislation. There's only a 10% correlation between what the public wants and what congress passes, because we never managed to separate freedom of speech from freedom of money to buy speech. So the wealthy have a disproportionate say in our political discourse, that's why they push stuff like corporate personhood to maintain power. Which goes all the way back to the formation of the country as a democratic "republic" to hand off unethical decisions around slavery, sexism and colonization to a semi-elected ruling class that maintains the status quo, much like we hand off minor sins like killing animals for meat consumption to butchers. In other words, the US effectively has a lobbyist branch which worships money, instead of a religious branch.
Of course the same argument could be used in reverse to say that all religious involvement in government is about the final control of money and power.
Clearly Parliament is sovereign, and Parliament is elected, therefore the UK is a democracy. And it's been so for nearly 400 years. Not that any of that guarantees that the UK is a "good democracy", but a democracy it is.
> Clearly Parliament is sovereign, and Parliament is elected
Its not though. The House of Commons is elected. The House of Lords and the Crown are not elected, and all three are integral components of the Parliament. [0]
But the House has reformed the Lords repeatedly, and the Lords can't stop them. It's like the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate which is constitutional because there is at least one day in every term where it can be amended by a simple majority vote (and, in fact, it can be amended by a majority vote at any time and has been).
The UK has not been any kind of superpower for almost a century now. The last decade is just the last gasp, like a disabled 90-year-old refusing to accept that he can't live alone.
The three name agencies have complained since day 1 about encryption. Of course they want it gone or have some backdoor. Remember to think of the children and that they'd never spy on americans... not unwittingly.
There's no smoky backroom where Biden and Macron and Sunak and Scholz sit in high-back leather chairs with glasses of whisky scheming about how to counter each threat to their power (with their super-secret puppeteers present only as a grim silhouette in the shadows, or maybe as an unexpected call at a climactic moment).
The only coordination that exists at the level of these superpowers is systemic, caused and communicated purely by a commonality of incentives and threats, not by words.
Every government wants power. One obvious means to achieve that is to retain an ability to surveil their populace. They grew accustomed to growth of this ability as communication shifted from whispered conversations to physical letters to telegrams to analog telephones to unencrypted Internet communication; now the ability of ordinary citizens to trivially encrypt their communication is a major setback to that expectation.
The timing of it is merely coincidental, or at most coordinated by the cross-border technological developments.
> There's no smoky backroom where Biden and Macron and Sunak and Scholz sit in high-back leather chairs with glasses of whisky scheming about how to counter each threat to their power
Why whenever anybody says anything that can be construed as conspiratorial do we automatically assume it is? World leaders can meet without the conspiracy, they do it all the time.
Why do we automatically assume that people conspiring is a farcical premise? Common criminals conspire with each other all the time. Business leaders conspire with each other when they form illegal cartels. Why can't politicians or even heads of state conspire? Why is that considered so outlandish?
For instance, the leaders of prominent American tech companies conspired with each other to suppress wages. Should this be laughed at?
There's a correlation but I wouldn't say coordination
Cultural drives are somewhat globalized, big news stories which might lead to some desire for government action are unlikely to remain purely local, and they're even more unlikely to be isolated events
The whole world uses the same apps to visit the same websites and see mostly the same news stories, tv shows, movies, books, songs etc
This kind of big legislation doesn't sprout from nothing it takes time to gather momentum and in the world right now it's not crazy to think that multiple people are thinking about the same thing at various stages at the same time
And when one of these laws gets proposed or passed somewhere it helps provide momentum elsewhere so you get a slow boil and then everywhere "at once"
A paraphrase of the age-old glib phrase is in order: If you outlaw End-to-End Encryption, only criminals will have End-to-End Encryption.
It should also be pointed out to them that saying “you there, yes you, stop doing that” to remote, likely anonymous, criminal types, has never been effective.
It's also worth pointing out that if you practise enough and with a little spare time you can do an dh key exchange with pen and paper. I look forward to the day when I am arrested for mathing too hard with random people in my neighbourhood (jk, there's not enough cops to arrest anyone anymore).
Where others see conspiracy I see incompetence (wish a dash of conspiracy). Time and time again it’s shown that our elected officials have no clue what they’re doing with tech. They simply do not understand the issues at hand in an era when tech is taking over more and more of our lives.
I’d say we should elect more people with tech knowledge but who’s going to quit their lucrative software engineering job to run for office, get paid considerably less and achieve little?
At some point, there is no point in distinguishing the two. Does it matter that Boris was a real-life clown or that Labour (or LibDems for that matter) were so high on their own farts as to not be able to make a reasonable challenge when given the opportunity (see 2010 election)?
No, there is not.
I subscribe to Grey's Law:
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
If they can't be bothered to actually learn about the tech, perhaps it's because their funders don't want to.
So, what's going to happen with secure banking? Will local govt officials (councillors) get to spy on all my credit card transactions and sneak a peak at my account passwords and PINs?
This will basically make e-commerce a risky business. If I buy something from overseas, will I then get in trouble for setting up an end-to-end encrypted link with their shop or is it more likely that international sites will just stop serving UK customers so that they don't have to comply with an unworkable law?
End-to-end implies traffic between individuals. So for instance WhatsApp can't read your messages but the end recipient can. That said, my bank did try to reassure me they had end-to-end encryption for my web access. It's not the same thing.
I strongly disagree, this makes zero sense, and I'd never heard of it in decades up until on HN just the other day. End-to-end means exactly what it says on the tin: END to END, with no middleman. The specific identity of what each "end" is, whether human, organization, or even a machine and not a human at all, is irrelevant. The point is that Alice and Bob can communicate information and nobody except "them" (noting that "Bob" here could be Future Alice too as in an E2EE storage service like a password manager) has access to plain text, only the ciphertext. This in contrast to things like email, where your goal is to communicate to Bob, but the relays it travels through also have access to the plain text even if the transmission between each hop is encrypted.
So if I'm talking to my bank through a link where only my bank and I have access to the info, that's absolutely E2EE. Same as if I'm logging into or commenting HN. HN is my "final destination" for the communication of information, and only myself and HN can see the plain text text during said communication (though of course in the case of comments HN then takes it and publishes it at my directive).
In contrast other sites may be both E2EE and not. If I'm accessing Migadu or MXroute or Google in order to find out something specifically from them, the HTTPS connection is sufficient for E2EE, since they're the other party. If I use webmail to send an email to someone else, the fact that I connect to their service via HTTPS doesn't make for an E2EE communication, because they're not the intended recipient, but a middleman, yet can read the plain text anyway.
>So if I'm talking to my bank through a link where only my bank and I have access to the info, that's absolutely E2EE.
Through TLS? That is certainly not E2EE. That is because a trusted third party (certificate authority) is involved to insure that you are actually communicating with the bank. End to end means exactly that. You are able to communicate securely with only the trust of the entity you are communicating with.
You definition pretty much covers any effective use of cryptography for privacy. That would make the distinction meaningless.
It certainly is. Encryption is a separate problem from authentication.
>That is because a trusted third party (certificate authority) is involved to insure that you are actually communicating with the bank
The CA that helps with mutual authentication does not have access to the plain text, and it's perfectly possible to have other checks on top.
>You definition pretty much covers any effective use of cryptography for privacy. That would make the distinction meaningless.
Wrong. In fact, it's your definition that excludes nearly every single existing use of cryptography, also making the distinction meaningless. For most people even Signal involves a central party and trust for establishing authentication. iMessage? WhatsApp? None of this is E2EE according to you, which is ridiculous. MitM attacks and endpoint security are the core modern challenge for E2EE systems, but E2EE is still notably distinct from all the many kinds of communication that existed and still exist that aren't E2EE, and where neither of those are even required because the plaintext itself is available.
Edit to add: I don't tend to use wikipedia as much anymore, but regardless of objective objections to its definitions, I do think it's certainly worth considering for a view on what subjective consensus is. Ie, whether or not the articles are all correct, if you're trying to answer a more meta question of "what do people think it is" then that's always helpful. Which of course is a big question when it comes to language definitions. So fwiw, its entry on E2EE [0] agrees:
>End-to-end encryption ensures that data is transferred securely between endpoints. But, rather than try to break the encryption, an eavesdropper may impersonate a message recipient (during key exchange or by substituting their public key for the recipient's), so that messages are encrypted with a key known to the attacker.
Which is how I've always understood it. Authentication is a major second level challenge to encryption, but without any encryption at all it just doesn't generally come up when it comes to privacy. There is no particular authentication for HTTP or telnet. E2EE is one of those "necessary, but not sufficient" items.
>For most people even Signal involves a central party and trust for establishing authentication.
Most people do not have effective E2EE while using Signal or other systems like it. That is because they have not verified their "Safety Numbers" which is what is used in the Signal case. It is a long known (since PGP) usability problem that makes such systems impractical for most. Relevant:
That's certainly one interpretation, but I'd counter that an HTTPS connection to an online shop is also end-to-end as the contents are encrypted such that any intermediate ISP cannot sniff the contents, but only myself and the online shop are able to.
The humanity of the individuals at the ends is not relevant. The point is that each individual only has to trust the other individual. Not, say a TLS certificate authority.
I'm sure we had legislative threats to encryption under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between.
I'm uncertain whether to be relieved (because multiple previous attempts have come to naught) or worried (because they might actually do it this time).
Brown was elected. He was elected as MP by his constituents, and selected as PM by the Queen, just like every other PM. Or, essentially, he was elected by the House, which is the electorate for the PM, but instead of actually holding a vote, the Queen just assumed what the result would be, which is how the UK always does it.
(Ireland actually holds the vote for Taoiseach, and every party solemnly puts forward their own candidate, and makes speeches on their behalf, despite the fact that everyone knows what the result would be. It's a piece of political theatre.)
You're right; we don't elect PMs. And it's true that Brown was elected as an MP by his constituents; and I was elected chair by my local resident's association. So what?
I still think a PM that doesn't lead their party into an election lacks legitimacy, and isn't a 'proper' PM. The most recent two - Sunak and Truss - weren't elected in that sense, because they didn't have any popular mandate.
We don't elect the party of government either, though; few people can name their MP. They vote based on party leaders, as long as voting is permitted.
The idea that the PM is "elected by the House" is nonsense. No such election occurs.
Being "selected as PM" by the monarch doesn't count at all. It's completely irrelevant (I'm a republican). The monarch appoints anyone that can "command the support of the House", which invariably means the leader of the majority party.
But in the absence of a General Election, the appointee cannot claim a popular mandate, and shouldn't do anything that would "surprise" people. Truss, outrageously, claimed to have a popular mandate, relying on the mandate that Johnson won. But he won his mandate more-or-less exclusively on the Brexit thing.
Reminds me of this famous sentence from puzzles/logic legend Martin Gardner:
“Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?”
I thought — maybe you think ChatGPT wrote the comment. But then I thought - maybe you think I used ChatGPT to recall the Martin Gardner quote. Then I was interested to see if ChatGPT would get it right… it failed badly!
I asked it for the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips… here’s the response I got:
“Yes, I am familiar with the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips. The quote is:
"I am convinced that the best food in the world is prepared by English cooks, and served in English restaurants. The best example of this is fish and chips, which is nutritious, cheap, and tasty. The fish is delicate, the batter crisp, the chips are golden, and the mushy peas are the perfect accompaniment."
Martin Gardner was an American writer who is best known for his work in mathematics and science, as well as his long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. However, he also wrote about a wide range of topics, including literature, philosophy, and popular culture, and was known for his wit and humor.”
I pasted the quote into ChatGPT and it understood Martin perfectly —
The reply was
“Yes, adding quotation marks to the sentence would definitely make it clearer and easier to read. Here's how the sentence would look with quotation marks:
"I want to put a hyphen between the words 'Fish' and 'And', and 'And' and 'Chips' in my 'Fish-and-Chips' sign."
By using quotation marks, it becomes clear which words the hyphens should go between, and it also clarifies the intended meaning of the phrase "Fish-and-Chips." Without quotation marks, the sentence can be confusing and difficult to understand.”
This will not happen. If the government (or Ofcom if the bill goes through) is seen by the populace to be the cause of WhatsApp being withdrawn from British users the outrage will be deafening.
No administration would do such a thing, even the incompetents in office at the moment. (quite possible is a terrible PR own goal followed by a u-turn, however)
At this point, why not take a stand and tell the governments across the world that e2e encryption is here to stay?
Signed by most of the tech community and the employers, with a threat to collectively retaliate and blackhole the entire country. Or something along those lines.
Unrelated, I just wanted to get it on record somewhere that I sometimes like to send myself random strings of characters and/or bytes. Sometimes to friends and family too. Sometimes they think its so funny they send back random strings as well. Its a thing we do, so I'm glad this law is not going to stop us from sending plaintext random strings to each other.
Ending encryption is like ending math. It's not possible and just moves the developers more into the underground. It could likely cause regulatory arbitrage situations too (e.g. developers create apps for other countries but determined people in the U.K. find a way to access them).
Ending encryption isn't really feasible. But ending the use of (true) end-to-end privacy in mass-market communication apps is entirely possible, if many governments unite to do something truly stupid. And that is what the US, the UK, Europe and (implicitly) China have all united to do at this time, and all using similar strategies.
It's quite easy, really. It's not hard to find phones communicating with WhatsApp's servers, and the moment WhatsApp indicates it can't decrypt a message for a UK user, fines and arrests can be made. You can simplify it further with Signal and WhatsApp: any UK phone number that can't be decrypted by the golden state decryption key is a problem.
You can get around these restrictions by sending independently encrypted messages over chat apps and through VPNs or Tor using foreign phone numbers, but at the end of the day, a messaging service is only as useful as its network effect. If WhatsApp refuses to forward your encrypted messages because your mom or friend or boss doesn't always keep their circumvention VPN on, you don't have much of a choice.
Calling these bans "ending math" is like calling speeding tickets attempts to ban physics. People will still use these apps and people will still speed, but the majority of the population won't because when you're caught you're paying a hefty fine (or worse).
Another thing that is quite easy: A service provider can simply stop offering his service in the UK if such laws are passed. I wonder what the electoral outlook is, of a government that essentially prevents it's citizens from accessing WhatsApp...probably on par with someone proposing to ban sugar or declaring cats to be illegal.
"""In response to more restrictive gun control laws, he set out to prove that all such laws were ultimately futile by showing that one could manufacture a functional firearm from hardware store goods, without using any purpose-made firearms parts."""
Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So should we be more concerned more about how these 1 and 0 are produced (no one harmed, everything legal) rather than what is distributed using these 1 and 0.
It's curious how it's ok to depict a human being sadistically cut to pieces while he is in terrible agony as long as there is no sexual arousal involved.
Any thoughtful continuation of this subject requires us to get into the weeds: even doing just that is enough to attract heavy criticism.
When it comes to porn, the general consensus is that it must be based on consent. But even that is ambiguous: whose consent are we talking about? The actors, or the characters they portray?
It's very straightforward to require consent of each person filming. No matter what the story is, actors have human rights that must be actively preserved.
But what about the content itself? Porn that portrays fictional sexual assault is generally accepted as morally good. How? Audience.
A person may have a fantasy where they are the victim of assault. Are they doing anything wrong? No. It isn't wrong to be a victim, or to imagine it. From that perspective, the foundation of consent is met. An adult watching fictional assault porn can bring their own consent into the experience, reframing the content into a useful and healthy context.
But what if that person is not an adult? The general consensus is that a child cannot give consent. I think a better framing would be to say that an adult cannot ask for, accept, or use a child's consent. This rule is the foundation for making it criminal to sell porn to minors.
Many would argue that any fictional portrayal of a child being sexually assaulted cannot have a moral perspective or utility. A child might be able to fantasize as the victim of their own assault, but no adult can sell a fictional portrayal of that fantasy to them.
---
So all that's left are the weeds: should a person watch fictional assault porn while imagining themselves as the perpetrator? Should fictional child sexual assault media be used as a pacifier for pedophiles?
These are hard ugly questions, and the emotional response from most people is an unequivocal, "no". Can we trust our emotions to lead to justice, or do they simply distract us with victory?
FWIW, my reaction to the side-of-a-bus adverts for Saw franchise films in the UK was visceral disgust that there exist enough people who would buy tickets on the basis of those adverts to justify the existence of the adverts, let alone the films themselves — if I thought banning them would actually make any difference, I would call for exactly that!
I don't know of human psychology really works like the toy model in my head (probably not, typical mind fallacy), but that's a separate thing to my own affect.
Yeah, i would not watch willingly any of that content if even i were paid to do so. I pitty content moderators who have to filter through such content.
Possession of "synthesised" CSAM (or extream pornography such as rape) is already illegal in the UK. There have been prosecutions too. I believe the reasoning was that studies revealed that viewing synthesised content, lead to a higher chance of possessing real CSAM content, or of committing sex crimes themselves.
The difference is the vast majority of people are against CSAM, but not too many people are against encryption. So the government doesn’t have a leg to stand on plus the penalties would be much less. It would be much more feasible to act against encryption laws.
To ban end-to-end encryption you effectively need to ban math. Even if all messaging apps will remove built-in encryption function you can still use e2ee in your keyboard app or something that would seamlessly decrypt incoming messages and encrypt outgoing messages on the fly.
They can't stop people from doing math, but they can stop people from sharing high-entropy (i.e. "looks encrypted") data.
There are of course workarounds (e.g. steganography), but if you add enough friction then the average person won't bother, and those who do try to maintain their privacy will be at even greater risk of detection and punishment.
Key escrow and other three-way encryption algorithms exist. You wouldn't want to use them in any normal circumstances, but there's no technical reason why you couldn't. A key for you, your recipient, and your friendly government agent.
Very few people actually write cryptographic code, and even fewer write code that is safe to use. I doubt many people will bother with some kind of messenger hook/overlay keyboard to supplant the native messenger encryption. After all, in some countries SMS/MMS is still in use and nobody seems to care about encryption there.
That depends on how easy to use you make this kind of software. An app that makes the soft keyboard produce encrypted output on the fly could indeed become a popular solution until it's prohibited. Like always, the problem is key exchange, though.
Sadly it suffices for them to get direct government access to the endpoints. They already have that for targeted surveillance, laws like this proposal just add the possibility of mandating interfaces for total automatic mass surveillance of all endpoints when foreign device manufacturers don't fully comply. Developing or buying 0-day exploits for iPhones is cumbersome and expensive, so the law steps in.
Or they could license strong cryptography to organizations that need it like banks & fintech. The 'banning' part means the ordinary citizenry can't use it except for online banking.
the title is somewhat misleading; the Gov hasn't said this exactly, this is just very likely outcome of this bill.
the bill says that platforms that host user generated content would be required to up the moderation game and to feed the content (messages) into a home-office built/approved system for monitoring. (not sure if all content goes through HO or if it's just messages). no one is banning maths or secure banking just e2ee for comms.
It also mentioned that people within the user generated content company would be held criminally liable for breaches of this law, spefically content moderation. completely defeats the point of being a company.
the whole thing is a fucking joke and should be scrapped, just thought I'd clarify some points
In practice, this probably just means that WhatsApp, Signal etc. have to implement a lawful intercept capability, whereby a targeted user can have their communications read but everyone else continues as normal. Doesn't seem like such a big deal, considering this would be done by court order and limited to users suspected of engaging in criminal activity.
If they end end to end encryption, then Signal and Telegram can read the private messages that the leaders inevitably use to get around records retention laws.
While it's technically possible to use Telegram safely, I wouldn't put it in the same category as Signal. Even WhatsApp has a better underlying cryptographic system.
Diffie just started by explaining that cybersecurity is all about securing some asset from threats such that the cost of attack was too great given the value of the asset. How do you protect the store that has all the cryptographic keys in the entire United Kingdom? It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. Government dude was totally out of his depth and the bill was eventually dropped.
[1] Turing award winner and the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman. Fair to say he's a guy who knows a thing or two about cryptography.