It's the same party that's tough on immigration, yet keeps importing lorry drivers, health workers and building contractors because they apparently can't be found inside the country.
They already are. They imprison journalists under terrorist acts if they criticise the gov or they come knock on your door if you put mean things on twitter.
But corrupt politicians? That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Or David Miranda (late husband of Glenn Greenwald).
Surely we believe that UK and USA are the good guys and they don't do evil stuff. That's left for Russia and China who are evil. Not like US and UK who invade and depose governments for commercial and geopolitic interests but "there's always a good excuse for it".
I think they'd argue that this is them doing their job: trying to negate the advantages that sophisticated criminals have over law enforcement efforts.
Could you elaborate on what you see as "doing their job" in this context?
Given that we don't catch, deal with appropriately or rehabilitate the majority of the non-sophisticated criminals, I'd suggest we start with that before we decide to start spying on the rest of the population?
Based on how RIPA and it's successors in the UK have suffered from excessive use I doubt that we will be restricting this power to "sophisticated" criminals if it comes to pass.
Surely this won't help them with sophisticated criminals, as they'll find some other way to communicate. You can easily build your own end to end encryption method based on things on github.
All protections of civil liberties and rights to due process can make the police's job more difficult - if you consider the police's job to be something like "catching bad guys without regard to any collateral damage that might be caused along the way". But in a free society that's not normally the job we want the police to do.
Of course the trouble in this case is that we either have private, secure communication or we don't. There is no halfway measure available. So both locking the police out of everything and giving them complete access to everything might be simplistic non-solutions to the real issue but they might also be the only options we have on this one so a least-of-evils argument may have to prevail.
I've personal experience of police not doing their job properly.
Anything that makes their job more easy will only make them more lazy.
Police work should be hard, because they have to navigate the law if they're to prosecute anyone. Lawyers love laziness, it's sloppy and steps all over lines of technicality.
Also, the legal right to violate citizens rights should never be 'made easier' by any legislation. To be on the end of state-enabled rights violations pretty much entirely ruins any trust one may have in 'the system'. And that trust seems to be increasingly valuable and decreasingly present amongst the Western populace.
> That's the problem with e2e encryption: it makes the police's job much, much more difficult.
So what? It should be difficult. They should have to literally send a guy to follow and literally spy on you if they want to learn a single bit of information about you. Not push a button and have your entire life revealed on their screens.
It's nonsensical to claim that the job of the police should be difficult and made to be difficult.
The restrictions and controls, which exist, should be an enforced legal framework. If today the police want to wiretap your phone they need a warrant, that's the control and 'difficulty', but then telcos will route your calls to them at the push of a button.
Again, the issue with e2e encryption is real and complex.
It's not "nonsensical" at all. Even with warrants, authorities will abuse their power. I've seen a story here on HN about police submitting literal blank pages to judges and getting the warrants they want. Don't tell me this warrant bullshit stops anything.
I refuse to grant them any power whatsoever by using subversive technology like encryption. Their only choice is to increase their tyranny by treating all encryption as proof of guilt, undermining the freedom of everyone, including yours. Will you tolerate the increased tyranny or will you oppose it? That is the question.
The easier the job of the police is, the easier it becomes for them to create a police state. We can argue perfect imaginary world semantics all day long, but it doesn't change the fact that in the real world abuse is rampant and power over others is pursued at great cost.
Making the job more difficult for the police costs nothing but money. To argue that we should relax our liberties to make the polices job easier, is to argue that liberty should be erasable by those willing to pay.
