Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
WhatsApp, Other Messaging Apps Sign Open Letter Urging UK Government to Rethink 'Surveillance' Bill
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I agree with everything you state above. What I don’t agree with is the comment Sciomar makes about standardisation of ports and consumer choice.
It’s already at Committee Stage having had First and Second Readings in both houses. The Reporting Stage and Third Reading are due by Autumn, so Royal Assent should happen before the end of the year. This is why the messaging companies are highlighting the issues the bill will create.
The irony of the British government pretending to care about protecting children lmao
governments really have capitalized on using this cause to justify anything they want.
For good people 1984 is a warning, bad people use it as instruction manual.
Not necessarily. All calls & SMS can't be encrypted with a VPN. And depending on what crime is being investigated the authorities will demand the data from the VPN provider anyway. The no logging promise many of them make is false. There's always logs.
Look how many criminals who use things like VPN's & apps like Signal/Telegram that still get busted. It just depends on the severity of what's being investigated and how much work the authorities are prepared to put in to it.
Most of the global internet traffic will pass through GCHQ systems, encrypted or not. Encryption isn't bulletproof either.
Lets be honest this isnt about child abuse images is about government overseen what their citizens is up to similar to what china does
The justification for such access is always to prevent stuff like kiddy porn being shared and distributed as they know they'll get 100% public backing. What they'll actually use it for is general surveillance & data harvesting.
Just like the NRA is in the US with it's strong influence over gun rights, Children's charities in the UK wield the same kind of power over rights to protect children. There have been a number of cases over the years where social media has been at the heart of the proliferation of child sexual abuse images being distributed with children's charities asking social media companies to do more to prevent child sexual abuse images from being used on their platforms but all they have done is used the same excuse time and time again saying there is nothing they can really do because it would affect end to end encryption. It got to the point where the children's charities have had enough of the social media companies doing very little and went to the government asking them to do something about the problem. The UK government gave an advisory to social media companies that they are to improve on child protection matters but again nothing was done. Now a few years later the government have had enough and introduced the Online Safety Bill.
You cannot blame the UK government on this one, they gave social media companies years to find a solution to prevent child sexual abuse images from being distributed on their platform and they have not do so, so the government has been forced to step in.
Edit: People need to remember, this issue was not pushed by the UK government, it started off by UK charities demanding that social media companies prevent the spread of child sexual abuse images from appearing and being distributed on their platforms and has been pushed continuously by UK children's charities. The UK government stepped in when the charities complained to them that the social media companies were not doing enough.
You cannot blame the UK government on this one, they gave social media companies years to find a solution to prevent child sexual abuse images from being distributed on their platform and they have not do so, so the government has been forced to step in.
Edit: People need to remember, this issue was not pushed by the UK government, it started off by UK charities demanding that social media companies prevent the spread of child sexual abuse images from appearing and being distributed on their platforms and has been pushed continuously by UK children's charities. The UK government stepped in when the charities complained to them that the social media companies were not doing enough.
100%.
The British Govt has always been very good at snooping on Comms. My great-uncle did it for a living and used to intercept foreign military radio traffic amongst over things. This was all done from a Govt building in the middle of the Rolls Royce engineering/manufacturing plant in Derbyshire. So it was in plain site, so to speak.
Luckily my company offers web based applications for work. My smart home stuff is all HomeKit and Nest based, but I will soon be kicking Nest to the curb as well. 🤙
And Las Vegas? Sure, there are cameras inside the casinos and hotels, but there are tons of cameras outside them too.
Of course it would expand to 'other purposes'. It's called 'creep', and some people in government are really way too creepy!!
The general problem is that governments often times get the sense that "something needs to be done", but a combination of not understanding the problem space and (cynically speaking) the nature of politicians to jam in things that will directly benefit themselves and/or secure their power almost inevitably leads to the proposed solution being worse than the problem it's meant to address.
Here in the US, we have multiple recent legislative actions that point this out pretty well - the online protection act in Utah would perversely require companies to collect and store MORE data on their users to comply with the regulations. The federal RESTRICT act, allegedly to stop TikTok from functioning as spyware for China, basically provides a carte blanche for the federal government to declare any service something that falls under the purview of government censorship.
Here in the US, we have multiple recent legislative actions that point this out pretty well - the online protection act in Utah would perversely require companies to collect and store MORE data on their users to comply with the regulations. The federal RESTRICT act, allegedly to stop TikTok from functioning as spyware for China, basically provides a carte blanche for the federal government to declare any service something that falls under the purview of government censorship.
I know…I’m referring to the British government actively covering up child abuse and pedophilia across their country for decades. Their concern rings more than hollow
As I recall, after second guessing CSAM due to the negative public reaction, they simply waited for the clamor to die down and implemented it anyway all the way back in Monterey & iOS16, and then shortly after issued a whopper nondescript “security update” to Big Sur, Catalina etc, which possibly contains it as well. That’s long enough ago, who knows what their approach is now, especially considering they learned not to make it public. After Apple destroyed the last shred of trust I had in that debacle, I don’t trust any of these companies with anything anymore. If its important enough that security matters, say it in person.
Saying that out of alll of cities in the world, only 7 have more surveillance than London and they’re all either authoritarian dystopias or about a billion people in size, doesn’t really put it in a better light.
The 'do something' reaction. 'Shoot, aim, think', to use an interesting metaphor...
Anyone who says the issue is just an excuse for the UK government to spy on it's people are people who are extremely biased against the government and know nothing about the issue. This has absolutely nothing to do with the UK government wanting to spy on it's people but everything to do with the UK government being scared of UK children's charities. As a rule governments (in a huge majority of countries around the world) do not want to get involved in the running's of private businesses. They would rather the business sort out the problems they have on their own. The issue at here falls directly at the feet of the UK's children charities because it is them and them alone who have been pushing the government to act and when the government has not and has been dragging it's feet, the first thing the charities do is go to the tabloid press telling them that the government is not taking the countries children safety to heart and that dealing with child sex abuse is not important enough for them and when you have a charity going public saying the UK government is not taking children protection and security seriously enough, the UK public start to listen, meaning UK voters start to listen and this gets the political party in power scared. If voters start turning against the party in power they stand to lose at the next election which is something the political party is not about to let happen. So what do they do, they suddenly take an interest into what the children's charities are saying and the result, the online safety bill.
This is all happening while the EU is forcing side loading on Apple. So let’s connect the dots.
Johnny the terrorist will simply make a TerrorChat app and all his friends will sideload it onto their phones. It will have custom encryption and they will go completely off the radar.
Meanwhile all law abiding citizens will be under a microscope and think it’s for the children and yay I have emulators on my phone!
In reality this will make bad guys win and good guys lose even more.
Johnny the terrorist will simply make a TerrorChat app and all his friends will sideload it onto their phones. It will have custom encryption and they will go completely off the radar.
Meanwhile all law abiding citizens will be under a microscope and think it’s for the children and yay I have emulators on my phone!
In reality this will make bad guys win and good guys lose even more.
