it's not very secret. a bunch of western governments want to be able to spy on the comms of their citizens and lazy terrorists/pedophiles/whatever with poor opsec. basically everyone including normies moving to well-encrypted chat systems makes this very hard (requires court-ordering/NSL/coercing software companies to 0wn their own customers), so instead they want to standardise making it easy for governments.
the UK happens to 1) not have a proper constitution with any encoded human rights and also poor judicial review and 2) an inherently authoritarian currently-ruling party and media ecosystem and culture 3) be a UN SC member, Five Eyes member, G7 member, reasonably big economy etc so it's government is in a good spot to push hard on this and see if it can break the will of tech companies, which would be a great technical and social precedent to help other governments achieve the same goal. Australia is also a battleground for this for similar cultural and political and legal reasons.
what is less clear is why Signal is saying this is a victory, unless they really are so cynical that saving face while losing is more important than standing up on this point of principle that their company was supposedly founded on.
> Casual spying on citizens is new to Western governments (unless you count East Germany as Western).
depends on "casual" and "new" I guess? Echelon is a dragnet from the 70s, and at least the US, UK and Australian governments spied lots on anti-war protestors and environmentalists and civil rights campaigners and trade unionists. Some Australians wrote a book called "Our ASIO Files" (ASIO is the Australian internal spy/security agency) based on being surveilled during the 80s.
"New" is very relative. GSM phone communication protocol from late 80s was intentionally sabotaged to have 54-bit crypto keys so it could be easily attacked.
(And it was only used over radio so base station traffic could be wiretapped even more easily.)
HMRC can do the most unrestricted spy on the British population, and there is a lot of data sharing between all the different parts of the state, ie HMRC, Police, NHS etc etc.
Any employee of the state can spy on you and the press also do a fair bit of spying on the population.
Its a national past time when thinking of curtain twitchers and neighbourhood watch schemes.
You really dont have a clue do you! Every part of the state you interact with takes notes, and the security services have access to it when they want it, bent judges do exist you know, and then they via Special Branch direct the Police.
When is an anonymous tip off by the public, just a cover for the state. They cant do it to everyone as the game would be up, but there is much more surveillance than you realise.
Alot of my relatives worked for the state, and as a kid I over heard alot!
the UK happens to 1) not have a proper constitution with any encoded human rights and also poor judicial review and 2) an inherently authoritarian currently-ruling party and media ecosystem and culture 3) be a UN SC member, Five Eyes member, G7 member, reasonably big economy etc so it's government is in a good spot to push hard on this and see if it can break the will of tech companies, which would be a great technical and social precedent to help other governments achieve the same goal. Australia is also a battleground for this for similar cultural and political and legal reasons.
what is less clear is why Signal is saying this is a victory, unless they really are so cynical that saving face while losing is more important than standing up on this point of principle that their company was supposedly founded on.