Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skilled 1011 days ago
Relevant,

ORG warns of threat to privacy and free speech as Online Safety Bill is passed - https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/org-warns-of-...

> Open Rights Group has warned that Online Safety Bill, which has been passed in parliament, will make us less secure by threatening our privacy and undermining our freedom of expression. This includes damaging the privacy and security of children and young people the law is supposed to protect.

Also other noteworthy discussions on HN,

Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32055756) (July 2022 | 462 comments)

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34936127) (February 2023 | 302 comments)

The Online Safety Bill: An attack on encryption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34727082) (February 2023 | 179 comments)

Ask HN: Online activities to be made impossible by the UK Online Safety Bill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36919175) (July 2023 | 105 comments)

Google's Statement on the UK Online Safety Bill [pdf] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443634) (September 2023 | 47 comments)

UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408196) (September 2023 | 302 comments)

1 comments

It seems that a lot of people idiotically think that what is best for the children is for them to live in a dystopia.
I expect that the overlap between "honestly care for childrens' quality of life" and "understands the ramifictions of this bill to any significant extent" is near zero. (Though there are doubtless many people who have inaccurately convinced themselves they are members of both classes.)
yes, but undoubtedly the UK's security services know that the best way to pass something unpopular is to recast it as helping

children

women

the vulnerable

much like the content of the 2010 CIA memo that wikileaks released[1] stating that the best way to increase public support for US military actions in Afghanistan is to emphasize the oppression of women

[1]https://wikileaks.org/wiki/CIA_report_into_shoring_up_Afghan...

It's annoying being one of the seemingly few people who sees through these techniques. I seldom voice support for a position because it does 'one thing' and WE NEED TO DO THE ONE THING NOW!!! Instead, as best as I can, I try to see the net effect on everything this proposition touches.

Even forget spending hours stewing over facts and data, there is just an instinct inside me that picks up that it is a ruse, a fallacy, a cynical ploy.

While that sounds like tooting my own horn, and I admit I've been taken in by some tricks before, it just isn't easy to stand by and watch. And even if you argue and make the case for online freedom, someone else just needs to come along and go, 'AH!, but what about the children!' and the masses are swayed.

"For the children" is how they sell removal of freedoms and justification for putting the general population under surveillance. The managers know what's best for all of us!
"Think of the children", except the population increasingly doesn't have any. It's nice then to imagine that approach would stop working at some point in the future, but probably not.
It's such a transparent lie. Most families in the UK with three children are in poverty. The UK punishes the child for existing, by denying it social security.
Just factually incorrect.
which part?
I was slightly mistaken in that it's 42% [1], not 50%+. But that's still a derisory figure. The cruelty of the UK towards children is absolutely real.

The two child limit, and associated rape clause, is punitive. If we look at UK families with three or more children, two million of those kids are in poverty [1]. Scrapping the limit would cost a token amount, and lift 270 000 [2] children out of poverty.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-av... table 4_5db

[2] https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/61220/the-twochil...

£1.3bn a year a year is not a token amount.
Looks like we all better start learning newspeak