"If you get this wrong, you’ll end up criminalizing a lot of people whose only offense is using or selling a phone that is too abnormal for the Government’s official tastes," she writes. "Either you’re an obedient consumer who uses what Samsung, Google, Apple, and Meta have to offer, or you’re a criminal. Good luck developing your moribund tech industry with that attitude."
Great that more people are speaking out against govt overreach.
Many of those lawmakers want to regress back to the 18th century, replacing modern banking with cholera. Not having a tech industry isn’t a threat to them, it’s the goal
Theres just as many politicians who fall for the “save the children” pitch as there is politicians who really truly want a surveillance state. It pays to keep repeating this. There’s no conspiracy.
Knowing nothing about the bill, the title of it tells me it's something that will compromise online safety -- and indeed, seems like it.
The one tasty morsel here is the (unprecedented?) threat of holding corporate executives criminally liable for harms. Of course it's over something so nebulous as "would someone think of the children!?" -- I would love to see this become more of a trend over the massive harms corporations are routinely causing and getting away with.
It wouldn't be corporate executives that control the UK government, these people come and go and without belittling the power and publicity they have, It would be the groups that own the corporations if it were anyone with true influence and power.
That's ridiculous. If Signal weren't centralized, it would long ago have split into four thousand mutually incompatible OpenSignal apps, all of which would be just as easy to ban in the UK app store.
The story of the Matrix project is about the closest thing you could find to a total vindication of Moxie's original take about federation. Federation delayed the convergence of Matrix to E2E-by-default by (as I recall?†) years, and will drastically complicate their response to the Nebuchadnezzar results, which were themselves in part a complication of decentralization and loose coupling.
You can coherently argue that decentralization is an important, or even necessary, goal for private communications. I won't agree, but I can productively hear that argument out. But I don't think you can cite Matrix as the counter to Moxie's point; with respect to Matrix, the more appropriate assessment of Moxie's federation argument might be "prophetic".
I will never sound like it, but I'm in Matrix's corner. I see clearly where they fit into the ecosystem. The world where Matrix replaces Discourse, Slack, IRC, and Telegram is a better world.
I do not see Matrix replacing Signal, or whatever post-Signal project is carrying forward their ideals 20 years from now.
† A Matrix project person will be sure to correct me on this, and I call it out in part to be candid that I'm not certain about the specific duration.
ironically, i agree with much with this: Matrix began in May 2014; we started E2EE in Feb 2015 and turned it on by default in May 2020. Centralised systems are way simpler and easier to reason about and present a smaller attack surface.
Is decentralisation worth it despite that? In my opinion, categorically yes. Just as the internet is better than a corporate WAN, and the internet should live forever, unlike the likes of AOL.
I would hope there's not much irony here at all. Signal has different priorities than Matrix. I'm sure the Signal project would like to think it can eventually grow to replace Slack, and I don't see that happening either.
I wouldn't waste time trying to be nice; I'll turn up whatever if you'll have me. Cryptographically constrained room membership in Matrix is still stuck behind consolidating on matrix-rust-sdk for E2EE, so we only have to address & audit it in one place - and progress has also been impacted by funding challenges (https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... etc). So you might have to wait a while longer.
Signal without SMS support is a poorer performing version of Element to me. There is little practical difference between Signal and most other popular messaging apps that implements end to end encryption.
Compare Element and Signal Desktop startup times, Element is nearly instantaneous, while Signal takes significant time to even open. Both are using the same software stack on desktop, Electron with SQLite.
When you get up to the thousands of rooms and tens of millions of messages (bridging and integrations will do that to you), Element Desktop Linux performance degrades severely and will regularly lose connection requiring restarts. And good luck getting out of that scenario or splitting up/archiving the account or groups of the rooms in a digestible format...
We've had Matrix in an org I'm in for a few years now and this has become a meme now.
Fixing this has been the primary focus of the core Matrix team over the last year - we revealed the end result at FOSDEM a few weeks ago, and it literally improves performance to be better than Telegram/Discord/Slack or anything else we've benchmarked against: https://youtu.be/eUPJ9zFV5IE?t=566
If you're feeling adventurous, try develop.element.io and enable Sliding Sync in Labs, and you should get instant login, sync, and orders of magnitude better performance (but it is definitely beta). You may need to run your own SS proxy, for which we published a guide yesterday: https://youtu.be/25wkV2ZCSsM
Unfortunately, those are all orthogonal: you are referring to server and client-server-sync performance. I'm referring to opening and navigating the client UI, and these issues are as present when offline and no homeserver communication and syncing is involved.
The developments you mention
are all important, great, and exciting but from what I've seen so far the UI performance issues are unaddressed. We had users try to report these issues on GH historically but they tended to get dismissed as "can't reproduce on my mac" or left unattended.
for the sake of completeness: they aren’t orthogonal. the reason that element web can take tens of seconds to launch is not just because it’s syncing with the server, but because it is loading hundreds of MB of json from indexeddb. Sliding Sync fundamentally changes that; in fact the sliding sync impl I pointed you at doesn’t persist any local state in indexeddb between launches (element web has never supported launching offline, fwiw). Therefore time to launch and load the UI is immeasurably improved.
Sure, but the main problem here is Apple/Google stores. Remove it there, and 99% of their users disappear.
Governments don't care much about Tor, for example, because they have very little leverage (and their law enforcement use it, but members of parliament also use Signal but can't admit it openly).
Have we forgotten about the internet? It wouldn't be difficult to make Signal as a PWA, and with iOS 16.4 coming all the relevant API's should be present.
As for TOR, I'd wager governments love it. Everyone the world over has decided to congregate one one official "secret stuff" platform and get this: it's made by the US Government.
And by all accounts the US government is well able to spy on it - but won't say how instead preferring to bring up cases by parallel construction^. It's perfect. I don't know what more a government could want.
It is fundamentally not possible to have strong privacy or censorship resistance on proprietary operating systems like iOS and Android if a state is targeting you. Even the so-called open source Android ROMs have no choice but to include hundreds of privileged binary blobs to make the proprietary hardware work. All a state actor need do is
leverage their no doubt existing backdoors into said binaries and all plaintext is revealed on those devices. They could also issue a secret order to mobile app stores to issue slightly tweaked Signal binaries. In either case Signal would never know that users are compromised.
For my own company which does security research, privacy is critical. We bring in only people who have been trained to only access the channel from dedicated QubesOS VMs, with no mobile access permitted. This is not perfect but it is as reasonable best effort until we can run Matrix home servers in a TEE (working on foundations for this atm).
Signal by contrast demands a phone number and assumes mobile handsets can be fully trusted so it already has ruled itself out for high risk use cases.
Matrix on the other hand I can run a private server of, and enforce whatever rules are appropriate for my threat model.
Corporations and governments are not responsible for keeping children safe online. Parents are. It is far past the time we should have learned that letting kids interact with strangers online is no different than it is at the park or the gas station.
Safety, like security, is best when layered. This bill appears to be absolute garbage, but as a parent doing my best to balance my kids' online autonomy and safety, I want the online analogue of reasonably safe roads and cars for them.
I wonder how much leverage Signal has here, if any. I have a friend whose partner worked at a high level in the UK Gov in the foreign affairs area. Still don't have any idea of what they did exactly, other than vague but incredibly interesting stories. They mentioned it was the app they were told to use for communication with official contacts. This was a number of years ago though.
> The legislation contains what critics have called “a spy clause.” It requires companies to remove child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material or terrorist content from online platforms “whether communicated publicly or privately.” As applied to encrypted messaging, that means either encryption must be removed to allow content scanning or scanning must occur prior to encryption.
This is not accurate. The “spy clause” (section 110) allows Ofcom to issue notices, if it is “necessary and proportionate” to do so, which could have that effect. In deciding what is “necessary and proportionate” Ofcom is specifically required to consider things like “the kind of service it is,” “the extent to which the use of the specified technology would or might result in interference with users' right to freedom of expression” and “whether the use of any less intrusive measures than the specified technology would be likely to achieve a significant reduction in the amount of relevant content” (section 112). This decision can be legally challenged.
The difference is important. Every country has a system that allows police to legally break into your home and search it – if a legal authority decides that it is necessary and appropriate. Whether such powers are abused depends not only on the text of the law, which is often as vague and open to interpretation as the Fourth Amendment, but also on the prevailing culture of the government and its judicial and law enforcement bodies. That’s why Signal’s president acknowledges that they are responding to a hypothetical.
While she won’t speculate on the probabilities, there are precedents which inform us about the probability that a democratic government would use these powers to break a popular secure messaging system over the reasoned objection of its users and developers. This law could achieve its goal of increasing public control over Big Tech’s content moderation policies without being used in that perverse way. Such perverse outcomes have not yet arisen under the controversial Australian laws which generated similar comments from Signal [1] and HN users [2] in 2018.
>Such perverse outcomes have not yet arisen under the controversial Australian laws which generated similar comments from Signal [1] and HN users [2] in 2018.
How could you possibly know this?
Everything is secret under risk of jail for disclosure.
I don't imagine Signal is much concerned with complying with Iranian law. If you don't employ Iranians in Iran or operate infrastructure there, why would you care?
UK jurisdiction ends at its borders. If they don't like Signal they can ban their own citizens from using it. I don't understand what possible "reach" they could use to stop Signal exporting its products globally.
Of course they will, because their security and privacy features would be misleading and rendered useless by this legislation. They have no choice.
Resident crypto-haters can hate coin-based privacy networks all they want, but fully decentralized encrypted messaging will remain the only way to get E2EE private messaging and chat in free speech hellholes such as Iran, China, the UK, and the EU.
Those organizations have no entity that does business anywhere (including the UK), and doesn't need anyone's permit to make its endpoints accessible to anyone.
Nothing about cryptocurrencies are needed for making a decentralized encrypted messager.
That Signal has public, known contributors and servers is a choice by their developers, not something necessitated by the fact that they didn't host it on ethereum or whatever.
Sad state of affairs.
This is just one of so many things many are willing to accept in the face of “dangers”. It’s on us, and our desire to be protected from all possible things.
Taking 60 questions across a handful of arbitrary categories and weighting them all equally is not a very useful methodology for this type of thing. It can help you differentiate Canada from Azerbaijan, but isn't going to be useful for comparing similarly-situated countries.
It is pretty authoritarian, heavy-handed and undemocratic, I just think people generally have trouble with that because Western countries are supposed to not be like that.
I mean were it a non-western country with this level of surveillance, in the open corruption, expectation to conform, number of unelected PMs, orchestrated suppression of political opposition, regulation of the press etc. we would have no trouble calling it worse things.
All PMs are "unelected", or at least not elected via a general election, beyond their election as an MP. There's a reason they're called a Prime Minister, not a president or similar. The UK doesn't directly elect the head of the UK government, and it never has. The PM is elected is the leader of the party that gains enough seats in parliament to form a government. Enough seats is determined by the simple question of "would the formed government have a reasonable ability to pass legislation in parliament, as is needed to conduct the business of government", nothing else.
This is the UK chosen form of democracy, the US may prefer a more direct form of democracy, but that's not without its issues either.
Yeah, I know. That's nitpicking. What I meant was the number of PMs who didn't have to campaign in a general election, at the very least not for a good while after taking office, I assumed that was clear.
I’m not really sure you can separate the two. The UK parliamentary system doesn’t require the PM to campaign, and never has. I don’t think you can call PM “unelected” when the system doesn’t, and has never, required them to get a direct mandate from the people.
Many would argue that the recent trend of PMs trying to appear presidential, and running general election campaigns based on their personal brand, as problematic. As the PM isn’t meant to be an important part of a persons vote. They’re voting for their local MP not the national PM.
Also every PM had to campaign in a general election. They need to be an MP to become PM, that requires them to run in a general election and win their seat.
> I don’t think you can call PM “unelected” when the system doesn’t, and has never, required them to get a direct mand
Just because a system doesn't require something doesn't mean it is legitimate or democratic. It's a personal opinion for sure, but I would call that undemocratic. Many of the systems we in the West consider autocratic do have some sort of 'representation' after all.
> As the PM isn’t meant to be an important part of a persons vote. They’re voting for their local MP not the national PM.
The PM does have a fairly huge impact on how the country is being run, where it is headed, its foreign policy etc. do you want to argue otherwise?
My point is the UK has had multiple PMs in a row who didn't have to make a case for their agenda in front of the people. I call that undemocratic despite what its system says, no system would consider itself authoritarian, that's a judgment passed onto them by 3rd parties.
I think the general expectation in the UK was that this is tolerated because when a new PM comes in, they're expected to win a mandate for their agenda in a general election ASAP.
> Also every PM had to campaign in a general election. They need to be an MP to become PM, that requires them to run in a general election and win their seat.
A MP running for a local seat is something quite different from being a PM, but anyway this is just one aspect of why I think the UK isn't quite as democratic as it presents itself.
> Just because a system doesn't require something doesn't mean it is legitimate or democratic. It's a personal opinion for sure, but I would call that undemocratic.
I think you risk arguing using a “No true Scotsman” fallacy. There are many forms of democracy, and many countries generally considered democratic don’t require the direct election of their governments leader.
For example the German chancellor is not directly elected. The Dutch prime minister is also not directly elected, neither is the Spanish Prime Minster, or the Prime Minister of Norway. Are they undemocratic as well?
If you look around most long established “democracies”, you’ll find that directly electing the head of government isn’t actual the default.
Indeed the most powerful directly elected politician in the world happens to be the Major of London. They have a surprisingly broad set of powers of a single directly elected politician.
> The PM does have a fairly huge impact on how the country is being run, where it is headed, its foreign policy etc. do you want to argue otherwise?
I most certainly would, as has been quite clearly demonstrated by the long succession of PM the UK has recently had. If the PM is so all powerful, why do they keep failing to get anything done, and keep getting replaced?
> My point is the UK has had multiple PMs in a row who didn't have to make a case for their agenda in front of the people. I call that undemocratic despite what its system says, no system would consider itself authoritarian, that's a judgment passed onto them by 3rd parties.
As a direct consequence of not having to put their agenda in front of the entire UK public, they’ve all failed to achieve anything of note. The only recent PM who could be argued to have achieved anything is Boris Johnson with his signing of the EU Brexit agreement, but he did that after winning a general election!
Every PM since then has been struggling to keep their party together, and struggling to pass anything in parliament, because they lack a strong mandate from the people, and parliament is punishing them for that.
> I think the general expectation in the UK was that this is tolerated because when a new PM comes in, they're expected to win a mandate for their agenda in a general election ASAP.
Until recently this was explicitly illegal. The fixed term parliament act prevented governments from ending their term early and calling an election. Explicitly to prevent the type of abuse that Boris Johnson engaged in, by calling elections when it’s most politically convenient for the government, and thus most likely to result in another win, and an extension to their time in power.
Allowing governments to call elections when it suites them is terrible idea for a democracy. It’s so trivial for the ruling party to abuse.
> A MP running for a local seat is something quite different from being a PM, but anyway this is just one aspect of why I think the UK isn't quite as democratic as it presents itself.
The UK electoral system could certainly use some work. But direct democracies aren’t inherently better. The US uses direct democracy for electing their president, but I’m not sure I would hold up the US as the pinnacle of democracy, not with the endless gerrymandering, political devision, and drive by parties to win at all costs.
You keep arguing that the PM has no power, yet I seem to remember a certain one who had economic ideas that caused markets to panic and pension funds to almost implode.
It seemed to me like Johnson had quite the effect on how the pandemic was handled for another example.
Yet you keep arguing they have no influence.
Yes, they're not Saudi kings, nobody's arguing that. Yet you're underselling their power.
Also, it seems to me that you may be confusing democracy with tradition. Anyway, agree to disagree.
These days I have a hard time telling the difference between either, because no one in a democracy will ever vote for crazy policies like having surveillance cameras pointing at themselves or having increasing harsher laws on freedoms both online and offline.
If so many important things are not up for the vote, is it really a democracy?
>>If so many important things are not up for the vote, is it really a democracy?
Exactly. For me, this is the myth of democracy. A party campaigns on a manifesto containing a few cherry-picked policies, aimed at appealing to enough of the electorate, to get them elected [quite often with less than 50% of the vote]
And, assuming they have an overall majority in parliament, this then means that every decision they subsequently make over the next 4 years is legitimised in advance because "you voted for this".
The only true democracy would involve regular referenda, whenever major new policies were proposed. This should be technically feasible with current technology. But, given the last time we had a referendum in UK the people didn't vote for the option they were meant to, I'm doubtful we'd ever see such a thing implemented.
I'd rather have that flavour of democracy than the one that voted someone like Trump into power. Hell, he's still managing to wreak havoc over there even post-potus.
That just seems like a joke to me. They literally have a House of Lords with hereditary positions which can alter the laws passed by the democratically elected House of Commons.
The House of Lords is becoming a joke (it's just a place an exiting Prime Minister sends their mates now), but hereditary peers were abolished in 1999. Also, the HOL often pushes back on the more extreme legislation the MPs try to get through the House of Commons.
But i agree the unelected nature of it is undemocratic. It should be replaced with a second elected house that can perform the same role of putting a check on the HOC.
Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK. Make the reformed second chamber a PR elected house and give them a slightly longer/fixed period between elections to shield them from the chaos of a general election and party politics.
>Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK. Make the reformed second chamber a PR elected house and give them a slightly longer/fixed period between elections to shield them from the chaos of a general election and party politics.
This is the best suggestion I've seen on HoL reform, ever. I mean, it'll never happen, but that really is a great idea, and would mean that the chamber would be clearly different from the Commons, which I've not seen another proposal making sense on this area.
No they haven't. They decided they don't want ranked choice voting (known in the UK as the 'alternative vote'). Proportional representation is a different system, which the minority Liberal Democrat party and others had long argued for and quite a lot of people regarded the substitution as a form of bait-and-switch. Additionally some had reservations about the scheduling of the referendum to overlap with local elections in parts of the UK.
In fact had the AV referendum vote gone the other way it is likely that the composition of our Parliament after the following general election would have been less proportional to the overall share of the national vote won by each party.
AV has certain desirable characteristics if you want to elect a single representative fairly. It makes little sense as a way to elect a group of representatives fairly. It sure is a great strawman if you're trying to kill off interest in real and appropriate electoral reform and fixing the systemic democratic deficits clearly evident in the current system we use to elect our MPs though.
That wasn't about proportional representation: that was about instant run-off: it's a vote counting algorithm, not an algorithm for assigning seats. For that referendum, they picked the worst simple voting system that was better than first-past-the-post, so I'm not terribly surprised it didn't win. https://ncase.me/ballot/ discusses these voting systems in more detail.
It's quite odd to me how we "hand wave" individual rights using the term "democratic" as if there is something intrinsic and unquestionable about it. LIke, sure 60% voted "democratically" for a decision to go one way. But what about the other 40%?
Democracy is a very weird term, dictate of the majority can be a democratic. We should use very specific names, like independence of court system, accessibility of court/lawyer procedures, level of politically motivated crimes(those have a huge impact on people's willingness to act for all of this to improve), freedom of speech, freedom of movement, highly competitive democratic procedures, freedom of economic entrepreneurship, freedom of personal relationships, etc
Funny how the US score dropped in 2016. I don't put a ton of weight into these rankings, especially near the top because they are so subject to partisan politics. Depending on where you stand in politics, you could make an effective argument that the US democracy slipped in 2016. But you could also make an equal argument that Canada is far less democratic after the events of the pandemic, truckers protest, etc.
Personally I think that the US, Canada, UK, Germany, etc should all fall into a general "Western Democracy" category. Roughly speaking we all have the same rights, though details differ and depending on where you stand in politics you may place one above the other, but at that point it becomes completely subjective.
Bills like these erode our democracy and we have to be vigilant, we also need to realize that in any western democratic country, we are light years away from true authoritarianism.
You seem to be suggesting that authoritarian and democratic are exclusive attributes but this isn't the case. Authoritarianism (the degree of control vis a vis personal liberty) has absolutely nothing to do with democracy (the way decisions are made).
A dictatorship can be less authoritarian than a democracy.
> A dictatorship can be less authoritarian than a democracy.
While it is theoretically possible, I have a hard time coming up with an example where that is the case. What dictatorship is less authoritarian than democracies?
It's quite common, actually. An obvious and extreme example would be American slave states pre-civil war as viewed from the perspective of Black Americans.
There is a well known phrase, the "tyranny of the majority." It is in fact extremely common for a majority to oppress a minority within a democratic system -- often with severely authoritarian methods.
> An obvious and extreme example would be American slave states pre-civil war as viewed from the perspective of Black Americans
When you define a large mass of people as property and deny them the franchise, that's not oppression through democracy, because its not democracy at all.
The US government 1776-1865 is obviously democratic, and it's obviously possible (and again, not uncommon) for a democracy to engage in disenfranchisement. Your objection is a form of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy in that you are attempting to define democracy as a non-authoritarian system which is demonstrably false.
In any event it's not necessary to argue this point because there are no shortage of further examples which include authoritarianism exerted over non-disenfranchised demographics. Here are some further examples of authoritarianism within the USA:
* Japanese internment of 1940s
* Every historic invocation of martial law (more than a dozen)
* Every historic invocation of conscription
* Historic oppression of women, which continued well after the suffrage movement in a variety of ways
There are of course countless other examples throughout the history of democracies. Even a cursory reading can uncover countless examples, from contemporary democracies all the way back to its origins in ancient Greece. It is not uncommon for a majority rule system to impose authoritarian controls -- in fact, it is the norm. This is why we have concepts such as constitutional rights, which are specifically designed to balance against the authoritarian tendencies of majority rule.
> The US government 1776-1865 is obviously democratic
Its obviously aristocratic republican with a quite open hostility to democracy at the beginning of that period, evolving over time in a rather unequal way in different parts of the union toward democracy (in both ideals and substance, though not in lockstep between the two.)
Having grown up in, and subsequently emigrated from the UK, I would say that Britain is a weird place when looked at from a distance.
The class system has led to a society where the middle classes consider themselves the moral guardians of the working class, while looking up at the upper classes with a mixture of contempt and envy. Middle-class right wing readers of the Daily Mail and left wing readers of the Guardian are more similar in that regard than either would like to admit.
So (while coming from a different political place) both want to crack down on the evils of the internet to Protect the Children and, of course, to save the working classes from themselves (and protect their neighbourhoods: think of the property prices!).
As both Conservatives and Labour need their votes, authoritarian cracking-down on issue du jour is always a good vote winner. Today it's the internet, back in the 80s it was MDMA and rave parties, back in the 1800s it was gin palaces and gambling. Same thing though: Britain's self-appointed moral guardians and their representatives in the media and parliament wagging their finger at everyone else.
In the UK if you want to buy food in the supermarket you have to have a HD video camera pointed in your face (often two cameras). When all major supermarkets introduced these cameras a couple of years back no one even discussed it, or thought it was odd, because here there is no assumption of privacy.
I was telling a coworker recently that I always use a VPN while browsing the internet. He was genuinely confused, and was asking why I would care about privacy unless I have something to hide. And this isn't just one person. I've had similar reactions when I've told people I only use signal, or refuse to use cloud storage, or won't list employment history on LinkedIn for privacy reasons. I get that I have an extreme preference for privacy, but people in the UK don't even understand why someone like myself value privacy.
This attitude is also adopted by our leaders and businesses, who by various means, mass surveil the public, typically citing "safety".
The issue with the UK isn't just that our government don't value privacy, it's that as a people we don't even understand the value of privacy.
>stores have cctv to make sure people aren't stealing
Lmao, is this really that surprising? Shops have had CCTV for ages now.
Self-checkout has more obvious cctv because you're giving more power to the shopper; self-checkout is just one step away from allowing someone to just walk out with the product a la Amazon Fresh (which has a literal FIELD of cameras).
Businesses have CCTV for the same reason that people have cameras fitted to their houses. 99.99999% of the time things will be fine, but the time something isn't, it's sure nice to have the evidence.
The UK has most CCTV cameras per capita in the western world. But they're pretty much entirely private cameras, including in London.
The government has no real ability to gain access to those cameras beyond asking nicely, or getting an actual search warrant. Even then the police still have to visit the site with the CCTV camera, and mostly capture the footage by filming the screen of the CCTV system with their phone (I've talked to Met police officers about this, and seen the footage). Most of those cameras barely work, point in the wrong direction, aren't recording, are so fuzzy you can't see anything. So comparing it to China is an apples to orange comparison.
The idea that these CCTV cameras could be used by the state for surveillance is laughable. The police struggle to get hold of the footage for actual in-progress investigations where they have real leads, and pretty much know what the footage is gonna show them already. So there's not a chance in hell the state could ever hope to get some sort of live feed of this data.
I don't think so, they had extensive CCTV capabilities 30 years ago and your comical suggestion that none of it really works is not plausible.
Besides which, the cameras themselves are a form of social signaling to remind people they're being watched - essentially the modern version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon.
Estimates 4.4 million cameras in London, only 20k run by councils.
> they had extensive CCTV capabilities 30 years ago and your comical suggestion that none of it really works is not plausible.
Perhaps you can provide some sources for your assertions?
> Besides which, the cameras themselves are a form of social signaling to remind people they're being watched - essentially the modern version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon.
It's well within the scope of the surveillance society the UK is flirting with, just as CCTV is relevant to a discussion about encrypted messaging software.
Your source seems to support my position more than yours. Perhaps you could explain how research showing that CCTV is frequently of low quality, and doesn’t seem to improve crime solve rates, demonstrates the UK governments extensive CCTV capabilities?
> It's well within the scope of the surveillance society the UK is flirting with, just as CCTV is relevant to a discussion about encrypted messaging software.
Your original point, which I refuted, is that London has a surveillance system which would make china proud. I think I’ve shown that no such surveillance system exists in reality. You’re free to move the goal posts, that’s your prerogative, but I’m not interested in chasing them.
I got mugged just a short walk away from a tube station in London (after having lived here for 4 years already, pretty good track record ruined by my propensity for enjoying night walks early in the morning; won't be doing that again).
But the police didn't have any footage of the event. Not even a business had a camera pointed in the right direction.
Indeed. When I was attacked near Clapham Junction and had a bottle smashed on my head, the police said it was too much trouble/costly to pull the video footage.
A friend had his bike stolen from outside Sainburys. They have high resolution viedo of it happening but refused to shared it with the local police without a court order.
Similarly a friend that runs a bike shop near a Tesco can't get Tesco to share high resolution video of burgalars breaking into his shop. They have it but it's their corporate policy not to share it.
On the one hand I guess right now all this surveilence is siloed to some degree and so less likely to be abused. On the other these seem like perfectly ligitimate uses of video to fight crime.
>He was genuinely confused, and was asking why I would care about privacy unless I have something to hide...
That's so oft-repeated it's become a cliché when someone is making a disparaging impersonation of a typical Daily Fail[0] reader. "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear!" said in a braying upper class Tory accent.
Of course, the ultimate irony was when David Cameron was PM and the Panama pepers came to light, exposing all his dad's shady dealings and secret offshore bank accounts [1]. Cameron's spokeswoman told the press "A family's finances are their own private affair" This kind of sums up what life in the UK is like. A priveleged ruling class, with utter contempt for the electorate; "Do as we say. Not as we do!".
[0] Daily Fail = The Daily Mail. A right-wing tabloid newspaper which is a by-word for the kind of zzz-elebrity gossip mixed with anti-immigrant "hanging's too good for them" ranting that [unfortunately] appeals to a large enough percentage of the British population, to keep the Tories in power, seemingly for the foreseeable future.
You have plenty to hide. Fortunately, nobody cares about you, at least not at the moment.
Put another way: the question of whether or not you have "something to hide" isn't yours to answer. Your user name is German; you should understand this better than anyone.
>I think that's a little harsh. Do you live in the UK?
I live in the UK and I agree with that. It feels like living in a country which is trying to commit national suicide.
Not helped by the fact there seems to be nothing we can do about it. We're so much a vassal state to the USA that we don't even get to decide our own policies. So maybe better to say "It feels like living in a country which is being ordered to commit national suicide".
>Respectfully, I don't think you can blame the US for electing Tories who are swerving towards the cliff...
No. I don't blame the US for Brexit or the Tories. But, as if those were not bad enough, there are the endless foreign policy decisions where the UK just immediately follows whatever the US does, even if it is economically suicidal.
> endless foreign policy decisions where the UK just immediately follows whatever the US does
That more the result of stupidity and Napoleon syndrome than some magic hold the US has over the UK. The UK, in particular our government, still wants to believe we're a geopolitically important country capable of projecting power and influencing the world. While there's some small element of truth in that belief, our actual relevance on the world stage is far small than our government wishes it was, and is only getting smaller thanks to wonderful incompetence of past 10 years of government.
>Either way, it’s not the fault of the US if the UK acts as a vassal state...
Maybe not totally. But history is litttered with unfortunate "happenings" to countries which refused to ask 'How high? when the US said 'Jump!'
It's only in the US and amongst a self-deluding swathe of British society that this "relationship" is seen as one of equals. The reality is that we're sucking up to the playground bully because we've seen what he does to the kids who won't hand over their dinner money. And we're trying to kid ourselves we're best buddies.
>> UK just immediately follows whatever the US does, even if it is economically suicidal.
>>What is a good example?
Well, the best example is playing out in Eastern Europe at the minute.
But there are plenty of others, including needlessly antagonising China and sabotaging our previously beneficial economic relations, because the US is spoiling for a fight with China. Ergo UK must do likewise.
I had money disappear out of my NatWest account several years ago, when I lived in the UK. No transaction was present to show where it went. Nobody at the bank would speak to me about it, not to this day. I'm talking making it obvious that they didn't want to speak to me about it. That was one of many incidents where I was blatantly ripped off. Nobody there cared one bit.
EDIT: thanks for all the replies! That means something to me, I'll see if I can't get this sorted out. It's just weird that even the NatWest Twitter customer support account ignores my DMs.
I've heard this can happen where money laundering is suspected. Apparently the banks aren't allowed to tip off the account owner that they're being investigated, with the result that the account owner's subsequent interactions with the bank become kafkaesque.
AML rules are sadly very Kafkaesque. Having worked in finance for over a decade I've done enough compliance training to know that, yes, if money laundering is suspected you literally are not allowed to help the customer. You're not even allowed to tell them WHY you're unable to help. Failing to do so can make you, personally (the worker), criminally liable.
Telling the client "I'm sorry, your account is frozen pending an investigation" might land you in jail. You literally MUST lie to them and feed them a bunch of bullshit.
It's a shitty system, but interestingly, one that was developed by the EU, not specifically the UK.
Your options are; wait until some nameless government agency realises they've made a mistake, and releases your funds, or start a lawsuit and spend lots of time and money fighting to get your money back.
Punishment as part of a secret investigation, that you're not notified of or have a chance to defend yourself against in court, sounds rather undemocratic*.
*This word is sadly misused to mean "any unjust system of government". E.g. it is perfectly possible to have a constitutional monarchy, the antithesis of democracy, that respects the right to a fair trial and to face your accuser. Conversely, things people vote for are routinely dismissed as "undemocratic" - in that case, it gets called "populism". As far as I can tell, the words, as (ab)used, have nothing to do with the method of government, and everything to do with the outcome.
>It's a shitty system, but interestingly, one that was developed by the EU...
Ahem. As with most of these things. AML and KYC actually originated in the US. And [as ever] was then adopted by other countries. The present setup was a G7 creation. Not specifically EU. I'll let my learned colleague ChatGPT elaborate:
The first country to propose anti-money laundering (AML) rules is difficult to pinpoint with certainty as different countries developed their AML laws at different times and for different reasons. However, one of the earliest examples of an AML law is the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) of 1970...
The "Know Your Customer" (KYC) rules originated in the United States in the 1970s, along with the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) of 1970....
Other countries began developing their own AML laws in the 1980s and 1990s, with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) established in 1989 to coordinate international efforts to combat money laundering...
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the global standard-setting body for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (CFT) policies. It was established in 1989 by the G7 countries, and its recommendations have been widely adopted by countries around the world....
On the other hand, US didn't get contactless payments until much later than everyone else and as far as I know still does that thing where a credit card is pressed against some paper to capture the number; I haven't even _seen_ this done in person (I've never been to the US).
> It's a shitty system, but interestingly, one that was developed by the EU, not specifically the UK
As much as, for the dismay of the average hacker news Joe, don't pray to the holy EU altar, I suspect sure those guidelines were sketched by FATF, an American institution at heart, ironically where such measures are not applied.
The AML framework is xenophobic and goes against things we consider basic rights like being innocent until proven guilty. However, it is not only ignored but applauded by the most progressive crowds that think its defending their countries from barbaric $place_from_the_east_or_south.
If a bank takes your money and won't tell you why, that lawsuit should be to get your money back and treble damages. As long as you can get in front of a jury, the jury will be very sympathetic....
Hopefully that's what happened, then perhaps there's a small chance I can find out what did happen and maybe even see that money again. But it was more than 10 years ago, I think.
>Well it's possible someone tried to make me look suspicious.
You don't need to have done anything suspicious. I've been a victim of this myself. Several years ago, I had a Shares ISA [0] account, into which I invested a couple of hundred £££ every month out of my wages.
After about 5 years I was out of work and needed to cash it in. But, when I tried to withdraw the money, I got hit with an "Unexplained Wealth Order" [or somesuch term], telling me that under AML I needed to fill in some disgustingly intrusive form explaining where I'd got this sum of money from [it was only a few thousand £££, not a fortune]. And, as I said, this was from the savings company which already knew exactly where the money had come from. As they'd watched it build up in small amounts over the previous 5 years or so.
I refused to comply with their AML/KYC. It then took me at least a few months and several letters, threatening them with legal action before they finally agreed to just close my account and return my money.
I also closed my eBay account when they started asking for people to upload scans of their passports to verify their identity.
These companies can fuck right off, as far as I'm concerned. AML/KYC is disgusting and I just wish more people would make a stand and refuse to comply with it.
It was a long time ago, but I think I remember something about an Unexplained Wealth Order. It could be that my explanation wasn't good enough for them. I need to chase this up again.
I worked as a consultant (permanent position) and had expenses that frequently needed to be refunded by the company. Perhaps they thought this was money laundering??
I think this is related to corruption - of which I am a target, which started in South Africa (where I'm originally from and have now moved back to), which seemed to spread to the UK when I moved there. I can't get anything in black and white either.
I don’t understand. Doesn’t your balance equal the sum of your transactions on your statement? I understand there is no outgoing transaction, but unless some “money in” lines were removed then how does it add up?
This is the country where the health service, transport department, fire brigade (amongst a whole host of other government departments and public bodies) are allowed to access your complete internet history *without a warrant*.
A bit harsh, but doesn’t miss the point entirely.
The first time I was in London I was shocked at the number of in-your-face surveillance cameras. Now I grew numb, but it’s still bad, actually worse. An estimate puts their number to 1 camera for every 10 people.
The UK is a good demonstration of why the US constitution is important. They have substantially weaker rights to freedom of speech, right to bear arms, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Of course the United States has tried hard in many cases to weaken or get around these protections, but it seems reasonable to say that Americans are still much more protected than citizens of the UK.
Most Americans misunderstand what their freedom of speech actually entitles them to. What your freedom of speech actually covers is represented via other legislations over here. And much as I think our government is a farce, we do have access to tell our politicians that. Frankly, if recent politics have taught us anything, it’s that freedom of speech doesn’t protect us from a shitty government being formed.
- right to bear arms
I’m glad we don’t. It’s a fucking stupid right in our modern age. How many shootings do you guys need before you wake up and join the rest of the civilised world with tighter gun control. And for what it’s worth, you can own guns legally in the UK. We just don’t allow unhinged people to roam the streets with guns.
- protection from unreasonable search and seizure
We have that in the U.K.
Given all the problems the US police force suffer from, you’re really not in a position to be gloating about protections from crooked cops.
Don’t get me wrong, the US does get a lot of things right too. But I wouldn’t say it’s ahead of the U.K. (nor most of Europe) in terms of rights. Roughly equivalent perhaps, but not so far ahead that we should all be modelling ourselves after you.
Let’s say americans don’t understand what their rights to speech mean. It doesn’t matter since you didn’t repudiate the fact that they may have stronger speech rights.
You are glad that you don’t have the right to bear arms. But that does not seem to me to refute that a constitution is important to prevent erosion of rights or that the US is ahead in terms of rights. Just that you personally don’t care about that right.
Finally, you state that in the U.K there is also a protection from unreasonable search. Fair enough. But is it stronger than what is in the US? Is it protected in form of a constitutional right or just a law that can be repealed at any time?
The strongest argument is that despite these apparent constitutional guarantees, it has not prevented police from infringing on these rights. I would agree. But that seems to me to be an issue of enforcement. Not having these would mean there would be no legal basis to change police behavior, only a social impetus. That may be enough but I would like to have both options.
What is "unreasonable", and regardless of the theoretical protections, are you at risk and do you have any practical recourse?
The scale of Civil Asset Forfeiture in the US suggests to me that large sections of US society are at risk and have no practical recourse.
Does the US having a written constitution actually help its society to retain their rights, or is it a fig leaf covering the rights you've already lost in practice, and an entitlement preventing society from changing rules that benefit those with power who exercise "rights" that ought not be so set in stone?
In the UK, Parliament has stated its intent to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights. It's true that one parliament cannot bind the next -- at any time, the UK parliament may decide to repeal everything and change even the foundations upon which our country's laws are built. The checks and balances in the system (including the House of Lords) protect us from the over-reach of a poor choice of government. Even with a large majority, and a stated aim of repealing the Human Rights Act, the current government has found itself unable to dismantle the our protections to the degree it would like.
I don't think you can argue that the US constitution gives you an inherent advantage in maintaining your rights.
Legislation doesn’t guarantee rights. If the same body trying to violate your rights with a bill can just pass another bill to repeal your rights, your rights are not protected. Two things are required to guarantee rights from a government: a constitution or charter that is extraordinarily difficult to modify, and a court system whose decisions can’t be overturned by the elected government, neither of which the UK has.
> a constitution or charter that is extraordinarily difficult to modify, and a court system whose decisions can’t be overturned by the elected government
Remember Brexit? It took them almost four years to achieve after the referendum, in part due to decisions by the constitutional court.
This is just a hypothetical destination at the end of the day.
For example the POTUS gets to appoint judges which has lead to the courts becoming increasingly partisan. And Trump did a pretty good job of abusing his power left right and centre without any repercussions.
Whereas on the flip side, UK politicians have been taken to court over the lawfulness of various decisions (such as “brexit”) and PMs forced to step down over incidents far less serious than anything that has resulted in POTUS impeachments.
And as much as the US constitution guarantees rights, the constitution can be changed. In fact 2 of the rights described here are amendments themselves.
We can all argue about which political system offers greater safeguards but ultimately it’s all just theoretical debate. A bad actor with sufficient support in either political system could do serious damage to the rights of their citizens.
So I think it’s a
erroneous to distil the argument down to such a simplistic model and then argue that America is somehow more free than the U.K. because of it. A more valid argument would be that we are roughly equivalent in a subject that is clearly very complex.
In the US our rights are mostly protected by one’s ability to pay for legal protection.
I don’t know how it works in the UK.
Having rights is all well and good, but in the US we’ve see. countless cases of government infringing on those rights requiring government to resolve them (via legal proceedings).
>rights to freedom of speech, right to bear arms, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure...
The trouble with this is that, while it's fine in principal [I'm a firm believer in the old agage "People shouldn't fear their governments. Governments should fear their people" ] it doesn't really stand up to reality.
The people who enshrined the "Right to bear arms" into your constitution envisioned it as a way to keep govenrment in check. If "The Man" has a musket he can oppress me. If I have a musket too, he can't.
Unfortunately, in the 21st century, "The Man" is always going to have a shitload of bigger, more lethal "muskets" than you and could swat you like a fly if he felt like it.
All the right to bear arms does is lead to a situation where your streets are full of guns, violent crime is rampant and your police force is armed to the teeth and more akin to a paramilitary army than your friendly neighbourhood bobby. So that every encounter --even for the likes of a trivial motoring offence, which would be a 5 minute telling off, a bit of grovelling and possibly a fine, anywhere else in Europe or UK-- has the potential to escalate into an armed stand-off or a shooting.
It's just amazing that so many Americans can simply not see this and still have that almost evangelical belief that the microscopically small chance that they could overthrow some future government if it got out of hand [spoiler alert: you couldn't!] is worth the trade-off of living day to day in a society awash with guns, violent crime and mass shootings.
> Unfortunately, in the 21st century, "The Man" is always going to have a shitload of bigger, more lethal "muskets" than you and could swat you like a fly if he felt like it.
I think you should study how it went down in Afghanistan. This argument simply doesn't hold up to reality.
And we're talking about a civil war where using mass destruction weapons like bombardment is much more likely to be out of the question. Additionally it is much harder to differentiate friend from foe.
Do you have any idea as to what would happen if you decided to take down "The Man" as the grandparent post has it, with your Walmart AR15?
Some kid in a bunker in Utah would take his hand off his dick long enough to pilot the drone right down your chimney, and blow you, your family, your gun, your dog, your truck, and about 100m radius worth of your neighbours into snotters, jam, and gravel.
>I think you should study how it went down in Afghanistan. This argument simply doesn't hold up to reality...
That's a different scenario. It's a lot easier [relatively speaking] to foment an uprising against an external enemy in the cause of "ridding your country of the invader". than it is against "the enemy within".
You've only got to look at all the unpopular laws that get passed year after year [and not just in the US]. When the possibility of <unpopular law> is first broached, there are dark mutterings that "People won't stand for it!". Then <unpopular law> comes into force, a couple of isolated people resist and get fined or imprisoned and, before you know it, <unpopular law> is an accepted part of "the system" --even if many people don't agree with it.
You've also got to bear in mind that, when <unpopular law> is implemented by your own government, they will sell it as being for the national good. No government is ever going to say 'We're doing this coz we're bastards and want to oppress you!'. It'll be for "national security" or "anti-terrorism" or "to protect the children". And it will fool enough of the people, so that the ones who do "make a stand" won't only be doing so against "The Man" but against most of the rest of the general populace too. They'll see you as being "unpatriotic", a "terrorist sympathiser" or a "defender of paedos" for taking a stand against said law.
Also, oppression is incremental. It's very rare that a country's government moves from [perceived] democracy to [perceived] tyranny over night. And, there again, even amongst the people who would conceivably rise up, everyone will have their own individual "red line" beyond which they'll feel aggrieved enough to act. And who wants to be the first to stick their head above the parapet?
Well I agree that in many cases people "standing up" to the goverment is nothing more than a LARP and that they are smart enough to slowly boil the frog instead of pushing too hard all at once.
But still, having guns puts a good guard against extreme situations where the boiling frog tactic doesn't work so much - e.g. forceful installation of a communist dictatorship. It won't guard us against slow deterioration but it can serve as a safe guard against hostile takeovers.
> But still, having guns puts a good guard against extreme situations where the boiling frog tactic doesn't work so much - e.g. forceful installation of a communist dictatorship
Again, how exactly do you see that playing out in reality?
> some future government if it got out of hand [spoiler alert: you couldn't!]
You absolutely could if the country had any significant portion of the population against the government. The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families.
> to day in a society awash with guns, violent crime and mass shootings.
But it’s not “awash”. I’ve been in the US for >50 years now and have never seen any gun-related crime and only know one person who was robbed in the 80s in New York by a guy who just said he had a gun. I’ve have however seen violent crime involving fists, bats, clubs, brass knuckles, and knives.
This is why when it comes down to it, Americans don’t want to give up their guns. The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up.
> The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families.
But this would still be true if the families are fighting with pots and pans. And if your enemy is a drone flying at 10000m it really makes no difference if you're fighting with an AR-15 or a pan.
And British people don't want to make that trade off. It's odd to use our gun laws to say we're oppressed by an undemocratic system when the vast, vast majority of people simply don't want the person standing next to them at the till in Tesco to have a pistol under their coat.
The timescale at which a disarmed populace becomes a problem is decades to centuries. It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. How long do you think it'll stay that way?
There are people alive who remember being herded into boxcars in Germany, in 2023 a well-run social-democratic beacon of progress and industry in Europe.
I'm not sure what the point is here. We all agree in the UK that we don't want guns to be legal, so they aren't. An American's view that we'd be better off if they were is neither here nor there.
Heh, I think the level of dislike we're talking about here is different. You may not like them but it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now. The point at which "power comes from the barrel of a gun" becomes relevant someplace like the U.K. is a ways off for almost everyone living there, thankfully.
The worry is twofold: first, not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place. Second, if things are really bad at present, bad to the point that fighting seems reasonable, you want to be able to fight. Disarming now means you'll likely be disarmed in an uncertain future, too.
Our modern social democracies seem really stable, but from the perspective of a historian there is no reason to believe they are. They're infants. There's a war in Europe right now, and there are people alive who remember the Holocaust.
The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).
330,000,000 potentially armed people (or about 260,000,000 armed adults) is something to be reckoned with. A bunch of goat-herding peasants in Afghanistan fended off not one but both superpowers, and at that mostly with small arms. The fact that the U.S. chooses to arm its population is definitely relevant for the direction its politics goes. Whether that's good or bad, net...well, we never get to know because we never see the counterfactual situation.
> The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).
And that's going to protect you from a drone strike how, exactly?
>>it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now...
>>not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place...
Again, this is a chalk & cheese comparison. People like to forget that the Third Reich was democratically elected. The German people read "Mein Kampf", listened to Hitler's "Make Germany Great Again" speeches and put their cross next to the Nazi party. And, up until the tide of war started to turn against them, most were pretty happy with the outcome.
It's also convenient to forget that, in those times, hatred of the Jews wasn't an exclusively Nazi, or even German, sentiment. In many other parts of the world, Hitler was initially seen as being a "good thing" and giving the Jews what they richly deserved.
Of course, with history being written by the winners, these facts tend to be glossed over now. So Hitler seized power and plunged an oppressed and terrified people into a war they didn't want And the rest of the world was always horrified by the Nazis' treatment of the Jews.
This is what I meant, when I said above that "Oppression is incremental". By the time you realise that you're living under fascism, it's too late to do anything. And you'll be in for a shock if you're depending on your fellow citizens to rally to your "Let's throw off our oppressors!" flag. Most of them will be quite happy to see you dragged off in the night, instead --you stinking Jew-Lover!
[replace "Jew" with "Commie", "Terrorist", "Paedo"... etc. as required by zeitgeist]
And re your point about Ukraine:
The irony is that Russia's justification for seizing areas such as the Donbass in the East is precisely because they say ethnic Russians there were being oppressed by the Ukrainian government. And that was in spite of those ethnic Russians having well-armed militias already in existence. So having an armed population didn't really help there, did it?
And, in the wider context, the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is being fought by the existing Ukrainian well-trained, professional armed forces, who are being supplied with billions of £££s worth of advanced weaponry.
And they're still taking a pounding.
So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.
> So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.
The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for U.S. civilians to arm literally everyone.
And, I should note, the quality of the rifles people own privately is as good as or better than what the military gets. The military does, however, get full-auto.
I take your point about the Nazis. I suppose if I had to point out a difference with respect to the U.S. today, it would be that the right to keep and bear arms is for everyone. Americans really don't discriminate (at least overtly), and that's a core tenet. The Jews in Nazi Germany obviously were or had to be disarmed before terrible things happened to them.
>The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for U.S. civilians to arm literally everyone...
You're still labouring under the false assumption that, were an oppressive government to come to power everyone would rise up against it. That's simply not true. A sizeable chunk of the population would perceive said government as a "good thing" either because; it smacked down on some section of society they detested [cf. Nazi Germany and the Jews], they profited from its existence [cf. Nazi Germany and companies like Krupp, IG Farben, VW, etc], it elevated them from nonentity to a position of authority [cf. Nazi Germany and people like Heinrich Himmler, etc.].
And there would also be a sizeable chunk of the population who would just keep their heads down and hope that, if they didn't draw attention to themselves, they'd survive it all.
I mean that is pretty much what the current policing system depends on. Enough people who might be tempted to step out of line are just frightened enough of the possible consequences of getting caught, that the numbers who actually do transgress stay just about manageable.
How much more so would that be true if, instead of a "civilised" interrogation, followed by a fair trial and a justified prison term, the consequences of raising your head above the parapet were being dragged out of bed at night, whisked away somewhere to be beaten into confessing and then put up against a wall and shot?
I think you're massively under-estimating the number of people who would either support an oppressive regime, or would just knuckle under and wait for things to improve.
This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true.
That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor.
If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.
It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average.
There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year.
And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated.
For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.
>most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids...
The fact that you have enough school shootings, happening over a long enough period, to allow people to formulate stats about what "most" of them involve is in itself an indictment of why your attitude to gun control is so incomprehensible to so many of us outside the US
In almost every other "Western" country, one solitary school shooting... ever... would be a catastrophe etched into the national consciousness. And would almost certainly have resulted in laws being changed to ensure it could never happen again.
I think you're right about it being a bigger deal elsewhere, and you're right about legislative reactions. I have several thoughts:
1) The U.S. population is really big. 333M or so. New Zealand is 5M? So, inflate the base rate by 66x. When doing "intuitive statistics" about this sort of thing, people think at the country level and don't adjust for population. That will remove some of the effect, but even doing that there's going to be more school shootings in the U.S. per capita, of course.
2) Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best. People who want to murder will just use alternative means. There are plenty of ways to kill schoolchildren if someone decides to do it. Easy availability of guns probably does increase the rate and deadliness, but not by all that much. Something else is going on in the U.S. Media contagion is part of it, imho.
3) The extent to which people pay attention to astronomically unlikely things like school shootings really doesn't make any sense. As I estimate somewhere else in these comments, the likelihood of a child in the U.S. being shot and killed at school is about double that of being struck and killed by lightning. Though it's a tragic spectacle when it happens, it's not something worth worrying about. The irony is nobody gives a shit about stuff that might actually kill your kids, like drowning, car crashes, etc. People are so, so very nonchalant about things that are actually risky...
I am sorry to say it, but Scientific American has become politicized trash under current leadership. It pains me because I remember it fondly from my childhood. The article you linked to doesn't even try to meet basic scientific standards.
TL;DR: evidence coming from academia (which is extremely anti-gun) only weakly supports a very small subset of gun laws as working. Taken in the light of publication bias and the file drawer problem, this is a nothing.
Thanks for the link. That does seem to be a more thorough analysis than the one in Scientific American, although the latter was good at linking through to the actual studies, so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article.
The RAND analysis doesn't appear to be as equivocal as you suggest though. It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success, but other laws have weaker support, which doesn't mean they aren't effective. Let me highlight two quotes:
"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."
"Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."
So while it's possible that there are a lot of ineffective laws being proposed, that's far from being evidence that no laws are effective, and it might even be evidence that the problem lies with the Constitution itself (which is another type of law which could be changed).
I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like. Perhaps if the gun lobby commissioned their own researchers to produce a report, you would find that sufficiently neutral, but I won't go looking for such a report.
One area where we might agree, though, is in disapproving of immature ad hominem arguments, so perhaps we just need to make sure that we're both extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-)
Again, I really appreciate you engaging and I'm happy for the opportunity to talk dane-pgp. I don't have much time atm so a little rushed.
>so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article
They're linking to a lot of their other stuff, iirc, and selectively citing things that support the position they want to disseminate.
> It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success
We have to differentiate between effect size and statistical "significance" (poorly named). The effect sizes (how much of a difference you would expect to see) are small iirc. For instance, the "assault weapons" one, which gets the strongest level coloring, is I believe a 0.9% decrease in murders if it's the study I'm thinking of. The "statistical significance" is, roughly, how much you can believe the effect size you're measuring is real, NOT how important it is. So you can have a 0.9% reduction in murders that is very "significant". I don't know what their coloring is, but my guess is they're using statistical significance, maybe with blending in some effect size.
>I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like.
I am from academia! I actually don't have a guns axe to grind specifically, it's a "we're going to poison the social sciences via publication bias and p-hacking" axe. Basically, people produce evidence for what's politically palatable (not even what they actually want to believe), and it's a huge problem. Another one is sex and behavior. It's abundantly clear that there are huge differences in behavior between the sexes, and that this is driven by genetics, and we've known this on the basis of good scientific evidence for 100+ years. It's not ~~socially determined~~.
>"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."
> "Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."
Let me translate: "Guys, we know this doesn't look good, but we promise...there's a way you can talk about it such that we can still keep claiming the things we want to believe are true in spite of the avalanche of evidence coming from researchers that also want to claim the things. Also, jk jk, don't punish us we want to keep our jobs :-) :-D "
One of the key problems here (and the reason for my axe) is that it's tough or impossible to do real research on important stuff like this right now.
> extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-)
I've enjoyed this :-)
"Mass shooting" (in the advocacy-numbers sense you're using it) is generally taken to mean three or more people hit by stuff that came out of a gun (framgents, ricochets count too). It is not "three people shot", much less "three people dead". When using this statistic, the average number of people killed is about one per "mass shooting".
What's more, most of these shootings are among people who are participating in organized crime in bad parts of cities. It's not random, innocent people getting shot. The random, innocent people getting shot ones are the ones that are profitable to put on news streams, though. They are exceedingly rare.
Using reasonable definitions of "mass shooting", the number so far in 2023 is 1-3.
Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.
> Shootings ... are a very small problem compared to things like ... car crashes, and tiktok.
That's an interesting claim. Perhaps you didn't know that "Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24" according to [1].
I suppose that statistic might include gun suicides and gun accidents, which (under an extremely contrived definition) don't count as "shootings", but that still misses the point that sensible governments have successfully reduced car accident deaths by tightening regulations related to vehicle ownership and licensing, whereas America is notably bad at doing so for guns, and is paying the price for that failure with the blood of its children.
If you could provide a statistic for the number of annual US deaths due to TikTok, I'd be interested to compare that to shooting deaths too.
Young people basically just don't die much. Whether something is the leading cause or the 3rd cause is irrelevant. The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.
Here's an example: Imagine you hear that the U.S. is 43rd in the world on math test scores among highschoolers, and China is 4th. ZOMG, A BIG DEAL!?!? Right? Well, that's what you'll hear in the media anyway.
Now, imagine if I told you that the mean U.S. score was 87, and the mean Chinese score was 89 out of 100. Does it still seem like a big deal?
Here's another point from another comment:
This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true.
That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor.
If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.
> The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.
But you weren't talking about the absolute size, you said "a very small problem compared to things like" (my emphasis). Please at least admit you were wrong about that.
In any case, as an absolute number, even one school shooting is too many, and if the US government can devote resources and legislation to reducing traffic accidents and drug overdoses harming children, then there's no reason why it can't do the same to reduce gun deaths, like every other civilized country does.
> Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men
You may be surprised to learn[0] that "Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 ... were among 37% of gun homicides" in 2019, so most killings are not like what you describe at all.
Haha, you make a bunch of good points. Again, I really appreciate the good-natured engagement.
> The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.
If you look at the whole sentence "...compared to things like...", I'm talking (or at least meant to be clear about talking) about the risk from shootings in general, not shootings of children in particular or school shootings:
> Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.
When I say "shootings", I mean the thing people intuitively understand it to be (Person A shoots Person B), and not suicides. If we include suicides, car crashes and "shootings" in the U.S. are ~ the same size. Suicides don't respond much to "no guns" as I recall...you get a couple percent reduction, but people mostly substitute (tall buildings, etc.). I happen to think it's cruel to prevent all suicides, and that some people who want to die should be allowed to do so with dignity, instead of alone and sad, but that's a digression.
Anyway: for adults, the relative risk is important since we're making decisions about allocating public health resources. There are on the order of a few hundred thousand "unscheduled" (preventable) deaths in the U.S. in a given year, and 12,000 gun murders. Get rid of guns, and charitably that number goes from 12,000 murders to 9,600 murders. But you could've saved a lot more lives working on the boring stuff, not to mention the astronomical amount of political capital you burned to get that done.
For kids, the the absolute risk is what's important since they basically don't die. If you're thinking about where to invest resources, invest not in making them die less but rather in making them into better, healthier people. Not to say investment in preventing childhood death should be exactly zero, I'm talking on the margin here (what do we do with the next dollar/minute/effort).
>even one school shooting is too many
...yeah, but it's not! Would you pay $100B to prevent the next one? Could've saved a lot of people from diabetes / heart disease with that money, instead of 8 kids. It's tragic, sure, and we're all tempted to say stuff like that for social reasons, but when you're really deciding how to allocate resources it's so, so rare that hedging doesn't make much sense. Remember, about double the risk of being struck and killed by lightning (a lot more people are struck and survive).
I don't have time right now to go in to the race thing, but I will point out that "Black" is ~14% of the U.S. population. Black people (90% men) commit more than 50% of homicides in the U.S., so they murder at ~7x the rate of non-Black Americans before correcting for things like which crimes get solved (correcting moves it to ~10x, they're better at getting away with murder since organized crime). If you're curious, this is where you should start (the UCR): https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Your tradeoff, of course, is that you have no freedom in the US because you live with a gun pointed at you at all times, blanket surveillance, free speech only if it matches what your government approves of, and no rights.
In the US you can be shot and killed by the police at any time, for any reason. You don't have any rights to retaliate.
If you look at homicide rates, London's is ~half of e.g. New York's, but the countries are really, really different in a lot of ways. It would make more sense to compare the U.S. to the European Union than to the U.K. Compare the U.K. to Massachusetts or something. The U.K. doesn't have a long land border with a violent, half-ruled-by-gangs developing country, doesn't have large rural areas, etc.
The available evidence suggests that magically removing guns from the U.S. overnight would make a dent in homicide rates, but not by all that much (I would estimate ~20%, charitably). Americans murder much more than average not because they have access to guns, but access to guns does make them a little more effective at murdering.
An aside, but it's always interesting to me that people are specifically interested in instances where a lot of people die together. I mean, who cares?
> An aside, but it's always interesting to me that people are specifically interested in instances where a lot of people die together. I mean, who cares?
The friends and families of those victims probably care.
I can’t say I’d be too happy if my daughter died at school from a completely preventable school shooting.
...right, my point is it's confusing that people seem to care more when a bunch of people are killed all at once. Is 30 people killed all together somehow more than 30x as tragic as 30 independent one-offs spaced throughout a year?
I suppose it highlights how one person in a bad mood can kill 30 innocent people, instead of needing e.g. 15-30 homicidal maniacs to do the same thing. It's not that confusing when you think about it.
I'm not sure about exact ratios, but in general society appears to agree that collective harm is worse. For example, the UK had 'Pals battalions' in WW1, and stopped when they realised that you could end up with whole villages losing all their young men in a single day. The damage to society from this tactic was too high, even if the camaraderie was short term better and the recruitment statistics were aided. If you wanted to learn more about why society cares more about collective death, I'd advise you start by researching topics like Pals battalions, on which plenty of research has no doubt been done.
Oh cmon that’s just human nature. We care a lot more about one of events like natural disasters than say automotive deaths - this isn’t a special insight.
Also, the victims of mass shootings (children at schools, attendees at festivals, etc) are the definition of innocent. That’s part of the reason.
Look I’m no social psychologist but I don’t think this is unstudied or surprising stuff? It’s generally known that humans are incredibly good at getting used to bad things that happen in a regular/routine/predictable manner. Eg deaths from cancer/cars/smoking/domestic violence/Covid/etc don’t make the news, despite happening in large numbers. It’s unpredictable suffering that jolts us - volcanoes, air crashes, shootings. It’s just the way we are.
If I had to guess(but what do I know) it’s part evolutionary - predictable risk can be managed, avoided, plannned for, controlled. Unpredictable is new and thus much more threatening.
The US made Mexico what it is and is entirely responsible for that.
If the US didn't want Mexico to turn into a 'half-ruled-by-gangs developing country' they shouldn't have let the CIA go full hog there and in Latin/Central America.
And that's the thing, so much of the violence and shit that America is facing today is a direct result of blowback from things the US did.
Imagine how much gun crime America wouldn't have if it didn't blow trillions of dollars on some dumb wars in the middle east.
Imagine how much gun crime America wouldn't have if it toss a bunch of their young men into an agent orange meat grinder in South East Asia.
I mean, you might be right about Mexico! I don't know the details. The fact of the matter is that Mexico is the way it is, and that has effects on violence in the U.S.
You seem concerned with blame (normative statement), but I'm just making a descriptive statement (how it actually is right now).
As for foreign wars increasing violence domestically in the U.S., I don't buy that. Most of the murdering in the U.S. is some cultural thing to do with young black and brown men that we haven't figured out yet (because it's essentially impossible to talk about it, much less do research on it).
Ah yeah, knifes are a sticking point. London's laws are 3 inch or smaller non-locking knifes are legal. Over that, you gotta have a valid reason. Having just bought it is a valid reason, as is being a sushi chef. But the general public is no longer allowed to just carry a knife within London city limits for no reason.
Being a sushi chef on the way to work might be a good reason to have a fixed bladed knife but being a sushi chef stopping off at the pub on the way home from work would not be.
It's also worth noting that that is just for posession.
Anything used as an offensive weapon, be it a < 3" friction folding knife or a ballpoint pen or can of hairspray, is covered by a different law.
> being a sushi chef stopping off at the pub on the way home from work would not be.
How does that make sense? Why shouldn't a sushi chef be able to go straight from work to meet up at bar with friends without being being guilty, until proven innocent (this is the UK not eh US) of being a potential murderer?
You're not "guilty, until proven innocent" of being a potential murderer.
In that scenario you'd be guilty of carrying a fixed bladed knife without a good reason.
You don't have a good reason to have a sushi knife on you in a pub because you could have just gone straight home or left it at work. That it might be inconvenient or take extra time isn't going to be seen as an excuse.
You might be the nicest person in the world but by incompetently bringing a big sharp knife into a pub someone else with less scruples might be able to make use of it.
Anything you do with that knife, that you just happened to have on you and definitely didn't bring to intimidate people, in a pub where you're clearly not at work as a sushi chef, would be covered by completely different laws.
The incapacitating kind of pepper spray is treated as a Section 5 ‘Firearm’ in the UK, and would land you in a world of trouble.
You can get unpleasant smelling / badly staining / hard to remove spray which acts as a deterrent by making an attacker easily identifiable, but that’s about it I believe.
You’re missing the point. We don’t need a surveillance society to achieve societal goals. But the UK made that choice. What does that say about the UK?
The mere presence of a potential harm does not justify all means to correct the harm.
Ah, politicians, consultancies, spooks, and civil servants all failing to understand cryptography. How novel.
It really is a shame that we do this. It is symptomatic of an inordinate amount of ineptitude in our ruling class, and goes back centuries. It is strange to see that it is mostly the English speaking world that suffers from this, too. Why are we so different?
Germany seems to be the gold standard. A very healthy respect for decentralisation and privacy that we lack. Much of Europe is similar, leaving aside the more autocratic countries. Switzerland is also very good AIUI.
What's a real pity is how there are so few open source alternatives with strong crypro and decent usability. Even when they do exist, marketing never happens so adoption sucks. Advocacy orgs have some things to answer for here too. Signal is probably an example of how to gain a foothold that ought to be studied.
Edit: also, mass adoption of ipv6 would help genuine p2p IM etc enormously. I have ipv6 on mobile but not domestic broadband now, so maybe the time is coming.
They aren't banning cryptography. This only applies to private entities hosting conversations for other persons. This wouldn't apply to private individuals hosting their own conversation servers, let's say using encrypted XMPP.
Are you going to have a conversation with yourself? I suppose XMPP is federated, but would this ban a group of friends using the same XMPP server that's administered by one person? What about services that aren't federated? It would essentially criminalize running an instance of anything and sharing it with friends/family/others.
That's a huge number of people who can't access secure messaging anymore. Journalists can't run such services, and as soon as somebody does it for them they're a service provider who falls under the regulations.
Probably yeah. Unless they wish to block entire IP ranges from their servers.
I wonder if this will finally make third-party app stores mainstream. On the other hand, signal isn't on F-droid either as it was moxie's pet peeve. But now that he's gone perhaps they'll reconsider in light of this.
It's harder and more expensive to mass-register with phone numbers. With one e-mail server you're essentially your own service provider with practically infinite amount of addresses for mere $5 a year.
I wish American companies would simply start ignoring silly foreign directives and force those countries to implement internet-blocking themselves. That way, the cards are on the table, and it's clear to everyone who's actually responsible.
Hurry! Let's approve this liberticide bill using the old "for children safety" argument before AI allows pedophiles to create their own real looking virtual child porn at home, and we run out of excuses to justify it.
We still have choice of jurisdiction for cryptography projects. Look at Liberland[0]. So the UK is fast becoming a mini-china. Just don't do crypto projects there then.
Great that more people are speaking out against govt overreach.