[pjc50]

Policy isn't made for you. It's made for the Daily Mail, who will relay it to voters in marginal seats, who are the relatively narrow set of people who can actually affect the outcome of elections.

It's not even made to be implemented. The previous "extreme porn" ban fell apart. It's made to get headlines. Then next year there will another "make the internet safe" bill. And another. It's no more going to be finished than "get Brexit done", and for the same reasons.

[quitit]

Sounds like we should just rename encryption to "child protection".

So politicians need to "remove child protection" in order to get their way.

(Yes I'm being glib, but it's possible to short circuit this kind of thinking. The USA have already realised that you can pass any shitty bill just by shoe horning an acronym that spells something like EAGLE or FREEDOM.)

[thomastjeffery]

Glib or not, that is the right way to look at the issue.

Children need privacy in order to be safe, just like everyone else does.

[TechBro8615]

Children need parents who care about them and protect them while they grow up in the world, whether that means a mother in 1923 keeping her kid away from the brothel, or in 2023 keeping him away from internet porn. It's the job of parents, not government, to protect their children.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

Sadly, I am inclined to agree despite hating myself for relying on ways to generate effective propaganda. The only way to deal with this is to create a counter narrative. Seriously, just the other day, I had someone mention talking point #1, #2 to political issue X like they were reciting it. It is annoying, but if that is the default state already..

[thomastjeffery]

There is no reason to hate yourself. This is morally right ground. Children need privacy protections. That isn't just a counter-narrative: it's a deep and direct criticism of the narrative that says we should dismantle privacy to protect children.

If an effort to protect children also endangers children, then that effort is not worthy of implementation.

Narratives are not limited to "how we share ideas", but also "how we contextualize them".

If you haven't heard the counter narrative we are proposing, then you may not be aware of the way encryption backdoors endanger children. It's important for us to share that context as narrative.

[mind-blight]

Do you have sources that describes some of the specifics with how weakening encryption endangers children?

I've been emailing back and forth with proponents of this law (working on getting access to someone who has mild influence in Parliament). They've been asking for sources that aren't just my own knowledge and experience, and framing how this bill also harms children would be extremely helpful

[thomastjeffery]

Of the top of my head, I would recommend Cory Doctorow. He's put a lot of effort into activism in this space.

[angelbar]

What protects children is communication with their parents, not that third parties can read their messages

[andy_ppp]

I think first past the post is becoming so undemocratic as extremists infiltrate the political parties it really is a worry. Only a change of voting system supports having the representation of peoples real views.

I really don’t think anyone in the UK is going to want every transaction they do online available to the government!

[pjc50]

Not so much "extremists" as "highly placed members of society and the media", and not so much "infiltrate" as "buy" or "walk through the front door". Remember, aggressive censorship of the internet is widely supported by the press. Just look at any of the Mail coverage on this.

> don’t think anyone in the UK is going to want every transaction they do online available to the government!

As usual, their desire to have every transaction of $BAD_GROUP (usually "terrorists" or "paeodophiles") watched hugely outweighs any desire for personal freedom.

[andy_ppp]

I still think politicians don’t seem to understand that without proper encryption their behaviour will be subject to blackmail, public scrutiny and more problems than it even is now. I’m not sure they want financial information and off shore transactions to be more easily discovered.

Adding in these type of backdoors and key registries or whatever other madness these fantasists want means you can guarantee these will be broken by foreign adversaries and others.

[pjc50]

We never did find out how the footage from a security camera in a secure zone of the Department of Health, a security camera the Minister did not know was there, was leaked, did we?

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/brandon-lewis-matt-hancoc...

(The obvious answer would be "by some other insider" - MPs communicate over "secure" whatsapp group chats all the time, but often with a large enough number of people in them that one of them feels safe enough to leak it)

[JumpCrisscross]

> "highly placed members of society and the media", and not so much "infiltrate" as "buy"

Zero evidence for this in the U.K. 81,000 voters chose the last PM in an election 0.3% were eligible to vote in [1]. They’re more middle class and rural than the average Briton and from outside the London cosmopolitan bloc.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60037657.amp

[pjc50]

That's agreeing with me: the Tory party membership is very roughly the old "high society", a weird little elite. And they chose the most extremely incompetent candidate. The extremism is coming from inside the house.

[andy_ppp]

Extremists can also be from "high society", as you say they chose an absolute crazy person who just came back to say that she was right despite the idea that giving more money to the rich will cause growth has been totally disproved by economists for generations.

The difference between rent seeking capitalists and dynamic job creating innovative capitalists does not seem to exist in the minds of these people. They believe both are great which is why we have laws like free stamp duty if you have enough cash to buy 6 houses at once like the current UK chancellor. I know that last bit seems like a joke that the UK chancellor avoided hundreds of thousands in tax for a loophole for rich people... what a Jeremy Hunt. These people do not have our best interests at heart.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the Tory party membership is very roughly the old "high society", a weird little elite

That’s not who pulls the strings. It’s middle class English and Scots, not the aristocracy or wealthy. This isn’t high-placed society buying power; it’s dues-paying Tories casting a vote.

[ta1243]

Just spin it. Create some targetted facebook adverts

"New law to allow people like Jeremy Corbyn to see pictures of your kids"

With a sinister view of him looking evil

"New law to allow people like Boris Johnson to see pictures of your kids"

With a sinister view of him looking like an idiot

[r00fus]

> I think first past the post is becoming so undemocratic as extremists infiltrate the political parties it really is a worry.

I'm sorry you had any faith in it to begin with. Fascism is a common outcome of a capitalist regime where the wealthy class would prefer keeping power to keeping democracy (thus losing power).

FPTP was always a fake voting system because it's so easily gamed. It's just all the more apparent now.

[unmole]

> for the Daily Mail, who will relay it to voters in marginal seats,

https://youtu.be/DGscoaUWW2M

[garfieldnate]

What you're saying here is that we should be contacting the press, not our representatives, right?

[gowld]

The press doesn't listen to you. You listen to the press.