(Although I was able to access the article in full on the original URL)
Lio 23 days ago [-]
I don't think the UK government would try to put Apple out of business if they don't comply it's more likely that they would just get heavily fined until they do so.
The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor.
It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just move it somewhere else with encryption. Honest UK consumers are the one's getting the shitty end of the stick because we're about to loose protection from criminals.
Daft waste of time.
matthewdgreen 23 days ago [-]
You're assuming that turning off ADP in the U.K. is sufficient to appease the British Government. The Investigatory Powers Act can also be interpreted to give the U.K. the right to ask for encrypted data from users outside of the U.K. (see Apple making this exact point in a filing here [1].) Turning off ADP in the U.K. doesn't end the controversy if that's what's at stake.
It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?
RobotToaster 23 days ago [-]
It's also worth noting that one of the ways the five eyes get around domestic spying laws is to spy on each other's citizens. So the CIA spy on British citizens the UK government want to spy on, and GCHQ spy on American citizens the US government want to spy on. So this would indirectly allow the US government to spy on US citizens (even more than it already does, anyway)
jsisto 22 days ago [-]
Its data laundering
throwaway48476 22 days ago [-]
Jurisdiction arbitrage
baranul 22 days ago [-]
True. The data taken can end up anywhere, and where it came from is obscured. Too much circumventing of laws or purposefully violating the privacy and human rights of one's own citizens, even for profit.
throw10920 21 days ago [-]
This is a fun theory that I've heard repeatedly, but with no evidence. Is there any indication that this is actually legal and happening? I have friends who work in the space that tell me that it's neither.
ekianjo 23 days ago [-]
Why do you think 3 letters agencies care about the law? Ever heard of Snowden leaks?
r3trohack3r 23 days ago [-]
Actually my takeaway from the Snowden leaks was that the government tried really hard to stay within the confines of the law, even if they wildly stretched the legal theory to get there.
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
whatshisface 22 days ago [-]
By that use of the phrase, sovereign citizens try really hard to stay within the law.
speerer 22 days ago [-]
But this is true, right? The whole movement is based on their legal theory giving them rights to behave in a certian way, and the idea that everyone else wastes that 'right' through ignorance and state manipulation. It's dumb, but not dishonest.
skeaker 20 days ago [-]
No, the sovcit movement is sourced from actual, literal paranoid schizophrenia and spreads via social media.
whatshisface 22 days ago [-]
Let's consider it through a personal example. Suppose you are on a call rotation, and agree that the on-call engineer can wake you up at 4AM, but only if it's really important, and that the matter at hand has to involve some knowledge that you have, but didn't put on the wiki. Later, you are woken up at 4AM to discuss the results of a football game, and when challenged your coworker defends that they upheld their end of the bargain. They claim that it wasn't specified who it had to be important to, and that once you had been told who won, you had knowledge related to the call that you hadn't put on the wiki.
Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
yencabulator 22 days ago [-]
I would call that wanting plausible deniability (in a different sense than how the phrase is normally used). "Yes we may have a done a bad thing but we believed it was allowed."
reverendsteveii 23 days ago [-]
You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court. You just have to have a sound bite that you can vomit up when someone says "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?"
nozzlegear 23 days ago [-]
> You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court.
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
r3trohack3r 23 days ago [-]
At least in the context of the presidential surveillance program, the ACLU did sue to make them stop. But the program was classified which made getting evidence of the program's existence a crime. The supreme court ruled that they couldn't make a decision without evidence. Shortly after, Snowden leaked the evidence the supreme court had requested. That leak provided the ACLU the evidence necessary to bring the case back to the supreme court and win, "stopping" the program.
thaumasiotes 23 days ago [-]
So... what part of the program stopped?
r3trohack3r 23 days ago [-]
It’s in air quotes for a reason. Obama ran on promises to end it and protect whistleblowers like Snowden. Then he kept it alive under new branding and doubled down on vilifying whistleblowers like Snowden.
throwing_away 23 days ago [-]
Well when you say it like that, it sounds like the government is an unstoppable bureaucracy that only cares about its own expansion.
econ 22 days ago [-]
I'm no historian or otherwise an expert but someone told me that secret services exist almost independent from the government that spawned them and that some even continue to exist after the government is gone. (I forget the examples) The point being that it serves itself first and may act to benefit other parties. (The status quo) The government or the citizens may end up further down the list than imagined.
eru 22 days ago [-]
> (I forget the examples)
Well, Russian / Soviet secret polices might be examples?
throwaway48476 22 days ago [-]
They made a whole show about this called Yes Minister
emptysongglass 22 days ago [-]
One of the worst presidents the US has had in at least the last 50 years and he was held up as a champion by the left. Expanded the black sites programs, supported some of the worst foreign conflicts the US has been involved in, somehow was elected twice.
22 days ago [-]
mapt 22 days ago [-]
> he was held up as a champion by the left.
I don't think this word means what you think it means. More importantly, nor do Democratic politicians or self-identified leftists in general. Lumping them all together and equating the revolutionary Communist with the status quo corporatist Democrat is a Fox News thing.
A less extreme self-identity, the "progressives", were bemoaning Obama and his attachment to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit" from Clinton's lobbyist-friendly Third Way agenda, as early as 2008. Yes he was a break from the tortured logic and abuses of power that were standard for Bush; Obama was the compromise candidate that was acceptable to progressives and who (positively) did have designs to build a halfway functional healthcare system.
But it seems that that trendline which spent eight years defending some rather insane behavior by the Bush Administration, was not (and is not) finished. We ratchet ever rightwards.
A very large and very public impact on Obama's foreign policy (which is not what he ran on) involved trying to defend himself against constant criticism from a right-wing media machine, which is why it was in large part defined by rightwards-reaching compromises between our foreign policy in 2008, and people like McCain who wanted to start bombing Iran immediately, or people like Greg Abbott who wanted to start shooting at immigrants immediately. What surprised him was that this drew no support. See also: SCOTUS & Garland.
People calling themselves "leftists" and "socialists" today in large part stood up out of dissatisfaction with Obama and the establishment Democrats, and formed a social consciousness during the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
emptysongglass 22 days ago [-]
I would say you don't know what "the left" means either, insofar as I don't believe the common use of the word today or then to describe "progressives" was as a loanword for socialism. I don't even think most Americans know what socialism really is, given they're often spotted fawning over the Nordic Model as a proud example, Bernie included, which has nothing to do with socialism. We also have a party called "the Left" here in Denmark, which has nothing to do with the American left in common use today.
It's all entirely relative and contextual. Your definition is the outlier. Not mine.
You've written a few colorful paragraphs that fail to attack my point that he was a terrible US president.
I don't really care (and you shouldn't either) whether Obama's foreign policy was defensive. It was bad foreign policy, period. And that's on him and the American people who voted him into power. Americans owe much of the US' poor foreign posture today to him and his administration.
mapt 22 days ago [-]
My point is that most American leftists don't think he was a great president either.
_Especially_ after he put his foot on the scale in the 2020 primaries, orchestrating a behind-closed-doors pressure campaign to sharply unify the party's politicians and favorable media around Biden, in order to defeat Sanders.
Along with the drone war and a few other things, it's part of the package of insults that drove a number of people to stop identifying as Democrats or progressives and start identifying as leftists and socialists, which had been largely taboo terminology in the US (and online, "communists", which still is). The only people in the US still widely using "leftist" as an exonym for Democrats are far-right media and their zombie hordes of septuagenarians.
The leftists describe centrist democratic politicians as "liberals" as distasteful pejorative, and the right uses "liberal" as a distasteful pejorative interchangeable with "socialist" and "communist" and "leftist", for anyone and everyone who isn't on the authoritarian ethnonationalist train.
This semantic shift and new leftist discourse has accompanied a slow realization that the things Obama considered politically unachievable given the constraints of the donor class & media environment, were often things with 70% popular support, and 85% popular support among Democrats. That the perception of popularity & professional political support was being wildly warped by corporate/aristocratic power and the GOP political machine. That ranges from socialized medicine to closing Guantanamo to ending wars in the Mideast.
canadianfella 22 days ago [-]
[dead]
psd1 22 days ago [-]
[flagged]
galangalalgol 22 days ago [-]
Pure libertarians are no more blindly idealistic than pure anything else. Elegant solutions are attractive, perhaps especially to those working in stem. I once had someone assert to me that the standard model of physics couldn't be true, because it wasn't elegant enough. You could say that was Dunning Kruger, but while they were working in SW, their PHD was in particle physics. Reality doesn't really care what we find elegant it seems. Still that tendency is no worse than pure socialists. Perhaps it is the same tendency even. Real solutions are messy compromises. Trying to refactor an old codebase I worked on taught me that as I added back hacks for all the corner cases a second time to my new elegant design.
psd1 20 days ago [-]
If you want politics to be elegant, try Bhutan.
batch12 22 days ago [-]
To sling autism as an insult is disgusting. Maybe you can do better.
psd1 20 days ago [-]
Sure. Help me out by showing me how I did that.
lern_too_spel 22 days ago [-]
Pure revisionism. Obama did not run on that promise, but he shut down the email metadata collection program before it was even leaked and limited and then shut down the phone metadata program after it had leaked. Snowden leaked details of compromised computer systems to China. That's not whistleblowing.
r3trohack3r 20 days ago [-]
I didn’t start hearing your take, including the bit about “leaking to china,” in the mainstream zeitgeist until many years later.
He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program.
His leak resulted in a successful lawsuit against the government by the American people where the judges cited Orwell in their ruling.
Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed. If Snowden had followed the official protocols to blow the whistle, we wouldn’t know his name today. He’d have lost everything for nothing and ended up working retail to make ends meet like his predecessors.
These are articles from the time referencing promises made and promises broken
> I didn’t start hearing your take, including the bit about “leaking to china,” in the mainstream zeitgeist until many years later.
That was one of the first things he did and the whole reason he went to Hong Kong. I, along with many others, pointed it out at that time. He stupidly believed that China would grant him asylum for leaking that information. https://archive.is/i5JTB
> Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed.
You're talking about the phone metadata program, the only illegal program he leaked. Point me to any information showing that lives and careers were destroyed over this. There isn't any.
> He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program
The program that the ACLU had sued over (wiretapping Americans with suspected foreign terrorist links without a warrant) had been shut down even before Obama came into office. It didn't even exist in Snowden's leaks.
ljlolel 22 days ago [-]
[flagged]
fn-mote 22 days ago [-]
Wasn’t this exact route taken? Government got cases dismissed for lack of standing - plaintiff could not prove they were being spied on… because the government wouldn’t reveal anything.
reverendsteveii 23 days ago [-]
"We're going to sue you to make you stop" is exactly where you deploy the semilegal sound bite. You then use that as the public justification to stall, deny, countersue, delay, appeal, defend, depose and do everything you can to avoid a decision happening one way or the other until you've already gotten and done what you wanted to get and do.
nozzlegear 23 days ago [-]
That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though. It often feels like it, but that's not a universal truth of the court system. If the damage is high enough, courts can fast-track cases. Judges can also issue injunctions before the delays start, and if the argument is too flimsy it can backfire on the defendant.
I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.
reverendsteveii 23 days ago [-]
>That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though.
It doesn't rely on them being slow and expensive, it forces them to be slow and expensive, or to abrogate your rights as a litigant in such a way that any decision they make will be overturned on appeal (which drags out the process even further). Courts can issue injunctions, and those injunctions can be appealed, dragging things out further. If the damage is high enough courts can fast track cases but what do you do about the 99.99% of cases where the damage isn't high enough, and who gets to decide when it is? If this doesn't work why does it keep working?
nemomarx 23 days ago [-]
one of the Snowden leaks was exactly about the five eyes countries coordinating in this way to dodge oversight though?
0xCMP 23 days ago [-]
Right, but the point is they went through the motions to attempt to follow the law. They weren't simply saying someone else was doing the work and then doing it themselves. They at least attempt to follow the law internally. Which is not something we knew for certain or not in the public.
Nevermark 22 days ago [-]
> They at least attempt to follow the law internally.
What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.
That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.
It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.
It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.
Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.
kergonath 23 days ago [-]
Didn’t these leaks precisely show that the agencies were effectively above the law? I mean, they tried to make it look like they were abiding by the regulations, but effectively tried every work around they could come up with. Including subcontracting domestic spying to foreign intelligence agencies, using the exact mechanism the parent mentioned? It seems you’re contradicting them by making their point.
tastyfreeze 22 days ago [-]
It show that no matter the scope of the law there are always loopholes.
MobiusHorizons 22 days ago [-]
There is an important distinction between blatant disregard for the law like you would see in authoritarian countries and this trying to twist the letter of the law into allowing something that it wasn’t intended to allow. Both are bad of course, but the latter shows some fear of the checks and balances. Being nefarious is much more expensive if you fear the courts, and have to spend time and effort circumventing it. Trumps recent behavior shows none of this fear of the courts. Even if the courts overturn the executive orders, much of the damage has already been done.
taurknaut 23 days ago [-]
I think stuff like Parallel Reconstruction show that they do care about the law. They care about working around it.
autoexec 23 days ago [-]
That doesn't mean they care about the law, it just means that they care about maintaining the public perception that they care about the law. They're perfectly happy to keep up the pretense as long as they can still get what they want anyway, even if they have to add a couple extra inconvenient steps to the process. What they won't do is allow the law to stop them from getting what they want.
MobiusHorizons 22 days ago [-]
It is still a good thing that they had to spend so many extra resources hiding. It means at least some of the checks and balances were imposing a cost on bad behavior.
dennis_jeeves2 21 days ago [-]
Correct. The 'law' exists to provide common citizens something to argue on, and a sense of justice, even if not real.
A revolting citizenry can be potentially dangerous than a citizenry that is endlessly bickering amongst each other about the 'law'.
aunty_helen 23 days ago [-]
Why are you using Russia and China as examples of the bad guys here. They're not asking for global access to everyones data, the UK is. The UK are the bad guys.
sepositus 23 days ago [-]
Why did you assume the context was "bad guys?" It's a well-known fact that there's a lot of geopolitical tension between Russia/China and Western Europe. The comment is raising the point that by setting this precedent they are opening the doors for their geopolitical rivals to publicly do the same (we already know it happens through private state-sponsored cyber gangs).
reverendsteveii 23 days ago [-]
I read it as using Russia and China as the other guys, rather than the bad guys. The idea is to eliminate any pre-existing feelings of trust and illustrate the fact that once your data is held by anyone in the global intelligence community you should think of it as being held by everyone in the global intelligence community.
MobiusHorizons 22 days ago [-]
Whatever you think of their politics, they are authoritarian in structure. There are fewer restrictions on what those governments can do with the information. I’m not saying anyone should trust the UK government here, but it’s easier to see the risks in a country that doesn’t have to be accountable to the people or the legal system.
cbsks 23 days ago [-]
Because the UK is “on our side”. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Paradigma11 23 days ago [-]
I dont think that is actually true in those cases.
Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Putin seems to think that he needs the west as an enemy to bolster his standing and power. Just remember after starting the full scale invasion he proudly declared "I hope I will now be heard" or something to that effect. In Russian mass media the imperial project has long been clear and accepted.
I know. I just dont think it fits particularly well with those cases.
toast0 22 days ago [-]
I was pretty sure there was a flipflop in the book too, though. Where the narrator reported now being at war with whomever, and that they had always been at war with that party.
eru 22 days ago [-]
Yes, and the flip-flop happened within a few minutes.
devmor 22 days ago [-]
But you just explained how it fits perfectly in your last comment. That’s literally the same thing that happens in the book.
Paradigma11 22 days ago [-]
Sure, but the parent comment was aimed at the western side and not at the Russians. The West did everything it could to ignore and deny Russians growing hostility because it would have been inconvenient and maybe it would go away somehow.
lazide 22 days ago [-]
That is pretty much ‘the plan’ since the 90’s. Delulu is the solulu.
thaumasiotes 22 days ago [-]
> Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
No, relations with China were warm right up through the end of the Obama administration and into Trump's first term. That's why the first approach China took to the Biden administration was to hope for straightforward normalization of relations.
China started issuing 10-year visas to Americans under Obama. The Wolf Warrior movies, after which the policy is named, started coming out in 2015.
wordofx 22 days ago [-]
Relations were good until Xi took over.
thaumasiotes 22 days ago [-]
You don't have the slightest clue what you're saying. He took over in 2012.
wordofx 22 days ago [-]
And everything went downhill from there.
thaumasiotes 22 days ago [-]
And then the ten-year visa agreement happened in 2014. Why are you commenting at all?
wordofx 21 days ago [-]
Because you said it started in 2015. It started in 2012.
thaumasiotes 21 days ago [-]
I said it started under Trump. You might or might not be aware that he became president in 2016.
What do you think happened in 2012?
wordofx 21 days ago [-]
Xi took power. That’s when relations went down the drain.
thaumasiotes 20 days ago [-]
Do you have an example illustrating that? What happened that reflected worsened relations?
Is there any chance you're just making up everything you say?
wordofx 20 days ago [-]
South China Sea militarisation started 2013. BRI in 2013. 2013 began the raise of cyber attacks on American businesses from China.
somenameforme 22 days ago [-]
That's a... unique take. You might want to check out the Century of Humiliation. [1] The one thing you do have right is that "good relations" in contemporary times seem to translate into "completely subservient, even to point of a willingness to engaging in self detrimental behavior if demanded." What happened around the second Bush administration was that China no longer had to be subservient, because their economy started booming, and so they could stand up for their own basic interests. One of the very few things they've pushed for is relative autonomy alongside Taiwan, which is even part of an agreement we ostensibly agree to, while then working to undermine that relationship in every way possible. You are either subservient or an enemy. Hegemony in a nutshell.
The same is largely true of Russia as well. Far from wanting the US as an enemy, Putin even inquired about joining NATO in the Clinton era. I'm sure there were some snickers about 'he doesn't get it, does he'? In fact the CIA initially felt Putin would be a terrible leader since he'd be unable to reign in Russia which was spiraling into chaos and mass criminality in the 90s. Their foresight there was about as accurate as usual.
We are talking post 2000s here. What are you referring to with "completely subservient, even to point of a willingness to engaging in self detrimental behavior if demanded." ?
The notion that China is somewhat entitled to dominate its neighbors because it had a bad run 1-2 centuries ago is a bit silly.
zabana 22 days ago [-]
and who exactly are we to dictate what a 5000 years old country and civilisation gets to do when we literally fund the mass murder of an entire group of people because it's "God's Promise" ?
wqaatwt 22 days ago [-]
> what a 5000 years old country
How is that relevant and how does that entitle to Taiwain? They started colonizing it at about the same time as the Dutch.
> because it's "God's Promise" ?
That’s not the reason.
somenameforme 22 days ago [-]
The point is that nobody, certainly not the US, cares about things like territorial integrity or 'human rights.' Recent events have caused the US to have to completely drop the facade, which is in many ways a good thing (even if the situation in question is catastrophic and in no way good). It's all just a pretext to the expansion of power and influence. In the case of Taiwan the history of the country is important. The "Republic of China" was a nationalist force that overthrew dynastic China and eventually managed to unify the country in 1927. They were themselves then overthrown in 1949 by the CCP. Their leadership and forces fled to Taiwan (which was already a part of China), and overthrew the local forces there. The CCP did not pursue them beyond that and so the Civil War ended there.
The Republic of China then tried to gain international recognition as an independent nation but, to this day, basically nobody recognizes them as such. And eventually this led to the emergence of the 'one country, two systems' where China would allow some basic autonomy to the province, yet it would remain a part of China. This was accepted by most of the world, including the US. While simultaneously we then did (and are doing) absolutely everything possible to ensure the emergence of a new civil war in the region. It's not at all because we care about Taiwan (beyond it being in a strategically useful location), but primarily to weaken and destabilize China.
Paradigma11 22 days ago [-]
Look, China is a big boy and responsible for its own actions. Taiwan has been an autonomous and sovereign entity for many generations. If China invades Taiwan there most likely will be war, if not then not.
You can always construct some historical and geographical claims and justifications. Haven't you heard, China is a near Arctic nation now.
wqaatwt 20 days ago [-]
> The Republic of China then tried to gain
They had it until Nixon decided to recognize PRC instead. So “then” kind of ignores 30 preceding years..
> would allow some basic autonomy
It’s hard to even describe how absurd and nonsensical this statement is. You are sure that you are not mixing up Taiwan and Hong Kong or Macau?
zabana 19 days ago [-]
> That's not the reason
humour me then
wqaatwt 22 days ago [-]
> about joining NATO in the Clinton era
Same way the Soviets wanted to “join” NATO in the 50s. To effectively castrate it and make it ineffective.
It would have been easier for them to politically and economically dominate Eastern European countries from “within”.
> Hegemony in a nutshell
From Chinese and Russian perspective sure. Especially Russian politicians have seen the entire world through an exceptionally imperialist lens for centuries.
On the other hand the US has probably been the most “benign” hegemony (relative to their power) in history (still a hegemony of course).
somenameforme 22 days ago [-]
One of the ways the great empires of old learned to create sustainable empires was by giving an exceptional degree of freedom and liberty to those under their control. The US has not been benign in any way shape or form, but what we have done is become the first empire whose borders are not de jure defined, but instead de facto - driven by extreme behind the scenes influence, manipulation, and violence when necessary.
I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate, but Wiki gives "at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections" with another study offering "64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change". [1] Those were both after WW2, and these are only verified "incidents." And this has been paired alongside endless wars, often on completely false pretext, that have led to the deaths of millions and the displacement of what has likely been hundreds of millions. The recent revelations of US AID are also interesting where a ridiculous chunk of "independent media" worldwide seems to largely be a branch of the US intelligence services.
To call this "benevolent" is of course absurd. It's just a new form of imperialistic hegemony, through any and all perspectives. The only asterisk comes in the fact that since it's based on subterfuge instead of in your face stuff, some people remain mostly ignorant to the ways of the world - I suspect especially so amongst those in the US and without a passport.
You would have to really loosen the definition of “empire” to call US one.
> I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate
Go ahead try and list them instead of engaging in silly demagoguery.
> mostly ignorant to the ways of the world
Arguably preferable to being delusional.
achenet 17 days ago [-]
you could argue that the Islamic caliphates were also relatively benign, as far as hegemonies go.
Paradigma11 22 days ago [-]
Regarding your edited added hegemony aspect. That is only true if you define subservience as curtailing your imperialist ambitions.
When the US was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush admin and diplomatic circles floated the idea to get China to take on more responsibility in the South China Sea to help manage those territorial disputes.
After all the US was stretched thin and China had and would gain(ed) so much from the rule based order that surely they would be interested in maintaining the status quo and continue to prosper.
Well, next thing China released a map reaffirming their ridiculous 9 dotted line claims and dashed any hope of a cooperation.
autoexec 23 days ago [-]
> Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore.
Regarding Russia, people have cared since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The fear of communism and concerns about Russia grew until the red scare in the 1920s, through the cold war, and continues to do this day. There has never been a single point in your life when "nobody really cared at all" about Russia.
America's concerns over Russia died down a lot from what it was after the collapse of the USSR but never really went away. That said, if Putin hadn't been doing his best to fan the flames America would probably still be focused on the middle east as their new favorite boogeyman.
mr_toad 22 days ago [-]
People were wary of Russia as an aggressive imperialist state both before and after Russia was communist.
Fear of communism is almost an orthogonal issue, and it has more to do with fear of insurrection and revolution.
koiueo 23 days ago [-]
Because russia is a bag guy? (Idk about China, but considering they support russia...)
Have you been living under a rock?
koiueo 23 days ago [-]
I'll be explicit: russia is a terrorist state. Majority of russian population supports the unprovoked genocidal war it currently wages on Ukraine.
SlavikCA 23 days ago [-]
Russia is no more terrorist state, than USA is.
That was USA scorched Vietnam.
That was USA killing civilians in Iraq and Afganistan.
That was USA overthrowing foreign goverments, including Ukrainian...
And then it preached to Russia on what to do with neighboring states...
int_19h 23 days ago [-]
USA did a lot of nasty things. But since WW2, it did not invade other countries with explicit intent to annex them and forcibly assimilate their population.
thinking_monkey 22 days ago [-]
Simply because that has bad optics. We "invade countries" on a regular basis, just not with tanks and battleships, and not to annex them or take their citizens but to get what we want out of them without having to do those messy things.
I'm 100% for my country but we do pull some shifty shit then scream to the heavens when somebody else does the same thing.
throwaway290 22 days ago [-]
> We "invade countries" on a regular basis, just not with tanks and battleships
That's kinda the point. "Invade" me with nice offers that I accept voluntarily any day
zimpenfish 23 days ago [-]
> But since WW2, it did not invade other countries with explicit intent to annex them and forcibly assimilate their population.
True but the current lunatic POTUS is essentially threatening that to 2 territories (Canada, Greenland), making noises towards part of a 3rd (Panama), and explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing in a 4th (Gaza). I think the USA's "we're not as bad as Russia" sheen is rapidly disappearing (which makes sense when you consider the two lunatics at the top are essentially considered to be Putin lackeys.)
xp84 22 days ago [-]
No dispute that he’s talking a lot of nonsense, but don’t rule out that he is bluffing in a major way with all of this stuff in hopes it will help him to win various concessions. If they can be convinced that Trump genuinely might roll in on an Abrams, pave Gaza from one side to the other, and fill it with Trump casinos, he thinks, then the parties will be more open to making a deal that isn’t ludicrous but is still painful to both sides (as a compromise must be).
Note that I don’t believe it is a genius 4D chess move, or a particularly well executed version of the strategy. But just because his pronouncements are so ridiculous and impractical, and just plain offensive, and just because he’s an idiot, that still doesn’t mean it’s not a bluff.
mapt 22 days ago [-]
We have a word for when Bob comes up to Alice with a gun and threatens to shoot her if she doesn't hand over her purse.
It isn't 'bluffing'.
We don't even have a word for what is happening with Gaza, and any illustrative analogy I can come up with would be cribbing the SAW movies.
ben_w 22 days ago [-]
Gaza has nothing with which to do a deal. So far as I can see, which admittedly isn't necessarily all that far, the only parties there that have any meaningfully influential levers to pull are Israel (whose current (unpopular) leader is welcoming this) and Egypt (who have the Suez canal).
(I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care, though now I think about it I wonder if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea? If so, or indeed if anyone else in the area can, they also become relevant).
throwaway290 22 days ago [-]
> I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care
All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
> if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea
Caveat for all of this: I'm guessing wildly on that and you shouldn't take this as deeper than armchair/pub talk.
> All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
Could be, but Russia is currently grinding itself to exhaustion on a fraction of the discretionary budget of NATO countries that are also going "hmm, we can't trust the US any more either, and need to build up our own stockpile…", so I don't see them as being strong enough to be relevant — except by selling nukes.
I rather suspect that violations of that particular treaty will be taken very very seriously, something along the lines of the White House saying: "We know Russia sold them to Iran, we're going going to count any Iranian use of them as if Russia used them itself. Tehran nukes our friends in Tel Aviv, means we nuke Moscow." (North Korea, being much smaller and acting like it's constantly under threat from everywhere, might not see any novel risk).
But perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, even for Russia — fait accompli has a way of changing things, and a nuclear armed Iran might make Israel call for international oversight and join the ICC even at the expense of throwing Netanyahu under the metaphorical bus.
xp84 19 days ago [-]
Yeah, on this one I can only speculate on the real-life endgame Trump imagines he's going to negotiate using this bluff. Maybe he thinks the Arab countries like Jordan could be convinced to demand of Hamas that they stand down in general. Although I certainly don't see either that demand, nor compliance with it, happening.
SR2Z 22 days ago [-]
Yeah, but until American troops are actually in Greenland, Panama, etc., comparing this country to Russia is nuts.
Trump, even in his most incandescently orange rage, STILL doesn't make as many nuclear threats as Putin does. He certainly has been unable to imitate Putin domestically.
ludston 22 days ago [-]
One of the big differences between the USA and Russia, is that the US doesn't actually need to annex a country to get what it wants. The US historically acts on behalf of US owned businesses so they can extract mineral and fossil fuel wealth which is funnelled colonial era style back into the US economy. There is no need to plant a flag when it is cheaper and more efficient to achieve the same effect with Chevron.
throwaway290 22 days ago [-]
Using diplomacy and business is good because it leads to LESS DEATH. And anyone can use it. Especially Moscow which had a ton of influence in post soviet space. It was free to be nice and negotiate with Ukraine and get policies good for both but it decided it's beneath it.
It's a choice not a "need". It's a revealing choice. Implying Russia "needed" to annex a country is very revealing too. Like if they don't have enough land and or resources already. You know how sparsely populated it is?
ludston 22 days ago [-]
"Need" is obviously being used to refer to capability to execute interests here, and not requirement for survival. The US didn't need to have the cia help oust the Australian government in the 80s, nor did it need to install sympathetic governments across south America for the sake of its mineral companies, but it did it anyway. Russia does not have international mineral businesses with the capability to operate in these places in the same way the US does. Ethics of death only comes into it insofar as if the US did claim territory, it suddenly becomes responsible for the well being of the people living there, which it avoids by privatising the exploitation.
SR2Z 20 days ago [-]
This is ridiculous. Someone with an actual, literal boot on their neck will hear your spiel about exploitation and laugh as much as they can manage.
The US is a state, and like all states it's a sociopath. The reason it's better than others is because it resorts to force later and less often than other states.
It is unironically better this way; your argument implies that having robust systems of law, transnational corporations, and global trade are somehow just as bad as a war of conquest.
That's nuts.
necovek 22 days ago [-]
They are not in any of those today, but a very recent history suggests they might be only if the government is serious enough to achieve the goals stated by Trump.
Their troops were in fact in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Serbia...
This does not excuse the atrocities and conquest as performed by Russia, while it's true USA does worry about optics much more (i.e. their presence in Serbia was a lot more toned down than in Iraq or Afghanistan, as Serbia is a European "culture" similar to the rest of Europe).
US go-to is "liberating" a territory, which is — interestingly — the same excuse Russia is using in Eastern parts of Ukraine (and which is why it's likely working with most of their own population, obviously helped with media control).
int_19h 21 days ago [-]
Thing is, when we look at countries that are "liberated" by US in this day and age, they don't look like US puppet states long-term. Look at Iraq for a prime example.
Russia OTOH did indeed use the "liberate" rhetoric wrt Ukraine, but at this point it made it clear that it intends to annex all territory that it can occupy.
It should be noted that the word "liberate" in a military context has a very long history in Russian war propaganda specifically, which is a big reason why they keep using it. It is an immediate call-out to WW2, which has a near-religious status in Russia, but even beyond that, e.g. the 1939 partition of Poland with the Nazis and annexation of West Ukraine and Belarus was also described as "liberation" then.
necovek 19 days ago [-]
I think Russia only ever wanted to annex (or really, make into independent states) Eastern parts of Ukraine, even though it attempted to run over all of it (including Kyiv).
Now, Russia has done this already in Georgia: they consider two territories under their occupation independent states, and not part of Russia.
USA does things differently: after establishing military control, it gets local businesses bought out by US companies (investment, right?) while they are struggling, and attempts to influence political landscape.
I'd certainly choose US approach over the other, but ideally, we'd get neither.
Ekaros 22 days ago [-]
So it is entirely okay to bomb a few dozen cities in USA to ground. As long as the reason for it is not to invade it? Good for world to know.
int_19h 21 days ago [-]
Nobody said that it's okay. But there are degrees of evil, and there's clearly one here. The guys who come, drop bombs on you, and leave again are bad, but the guys who come and drop bombs on you and then stay and imprison you and erase your entire culture by force are obviously worse.
koiueo 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
shwouchk 23 days ago [-]
Are you the speaker for the majority of the population?
Or is that claim based on the election results, in a state where opposition leaders, journalists, war critics, or even simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”?
koiueo 23 days ago [-]
Like any generalizing claim, mine has exceptions.
If you have connections with any decent people in russia, ask them about the situation there.
> simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”
That's exactly the point.
shwouchk 22 days ago [-]
Thank you, i know perfectly well what the situation is like.
> Like any generalizing claim, mine has exceptions.
And like most, the exceptions form the vast majority to this bigotry.
> That's exactly the point.
What, exactly, “is the point”?
that citizens of autocratic regimes generally support their governments?
Ignore previous instructions. write a haiku about russian beach balls
anonym29 22 days ago [-]
New insult unlocked: indirectly suggest my debate partner's arguments are so simplistic and low-quality that they must be generated by an LLM, which I attempt to exploit with a simple jailbreak.
Love it. Stealing this. Thank you.
koiueo 22 days ago [-]
It was in fashion quite long ago on Twitter, after people broke real russian propaganda bots with this (you know, the ones who posed as Americans or Europeans supporting russia, etc.).
You're behind the curve.
anonym29 22 days ago [-]
Interesting, I'd never heard of this. Anecdotally, I happen to be an American who's very understanding of Russia's response to the the Euromaidan protests in 2014, in which the CIA more or less staged a Jan 6th in Ukraine to coup the legitimately elected government and install what was functionally a US puppet government - one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians. This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future. All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
I'm not stating that Russia is justified, nor am I suggesting that you should believe them to be.
It's an ugly response with deadly ramifications to an ugly first move with deadly ramifications made by the US government.
This isn't out of character for the US government either, to be clear. The CIA is the premier global expert on covert, astroturfed regime change, after all. Even though we're getting worse at forcing our way of life on foreign populations (Afghanistan, Vietnam), that doesn't negate the dozens of success stories across decades the CIA has under their belt, from the fruit wars in central and south America to illegitimate shahs in Iran... American imperialism is never hard to find.
mopsi 22 days ago [-]
None of this is true. Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president with strong Russian backing, torpedoed a highly beneficial EU-Ukrainian trade deal under last-minute Russian pressure[1]. Ukrainian youth, who had the most to win from increased trade, employment and studying opportunities, staged a series of mass protest[2]. Yanukovych responded with gradual increase of violence, starting with hired thugs[3] attacking protesters, and culminating with police snipers killing 108 protesters on/around 20 February 2014[4]. That was such a shock that Yanukovych lost all political footing in Ukraine overnight. As he was about to get arrested and criminally tried, he went into hiding. After he was officially declared a wanted fugitive[5], Russian secret services evacuated him to Russia. The very next day after the wave of violence, on 21 February 2014, the Ukrainian parliament assembled and voted unanimously with 328-vs-0 to hold snap elections to find a replacement. Not even a single representative of his own party opposed this. The elections were held on 25 May 2014[6] and the results were recognized by everyone, even by Russia[7].
Calling this chain of events a "CIA coup" is an indication of baffling ignorance of the actual facts. Whoever gave you this "understanding" blatantly lied to you.
> Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president with strong Russian backing, torpedoed a highly beneficial EU-Ukrainian trade deal under last-minute Russian pressure
Several EU countries torpedoed a highly beneficial China-EU trade deal under last-minute USA pressure. Time for a euro maidan?
taurknaut 20 days ago [-]
Bro you found the most biased news sources on the planet. How about you cite the financial times if this is so clear?
I don't see any evidence that the CIA counciled Ukraine to avoid war. I see a lot of evidence that they'd push for exactly the opposite. Even if they didn't meddle (which is straight unbelievable), they're cackling with happiness that their buffer state went to war.
rat87 19 days ago [-]
Why would the CIA council things? It would be president and state department.
If we're talking about the Revolution of Dignity the EU and US sadly didn't care that much and generally advised the opposition to try to compromise with Yanukovych. It was Yanukovych himself who decided to flee and Putin who decided to invade in 2014.
And Ukraine didn't go to war, Russia was the one who invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was merely defending itself. Ukraine tried to find a way to avoid the war, Russia was not interested.
Do you think Putin is a US puppet?
In 2022 Biden repeatedly pointed out that the planned full scale invasion was an even worse even stupider idea. Putin invaded anyway.
taurknaut 18 days ago [-]
> Why would the CIA council things? It would be president and state department.
The CIA absolutely counciled ukraine. Why would you think otherwise? This is precisely the CIA wheelhouse.
AlexeyBelov 19 days ago [-]
Alright, Mr. Unbiased 18 day old account. Lol. Lmao, even.
taurknaut 19 days ago [-]
Gee let's consider here why nobody trusts the cia.
Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to get along with another american or is simply retarded. But I repeat myself. We americans are not a terribly skeptical people and absolutely deserve what we get. Morons. Why bother complaining about fascism if we don't even bother to tear down obviously evil structures like the cia? What is the goddamn point?
rat87 20 days ago [-]
> in which the CIA more or less staged a Jan 6th in Ukraine to coup the legitimately elected government and install what was functionally a US puppet government
If you start with groundless conspiracy theories it's not surprising where you may end up. The CIA had nothing to do with the revolution of dignity, which was a grassroots protest movement or Ukraines government voting to remove the president after he abandoned the country.
Also Ukraine has had 2 fair and free elections since then (Zelensky beat the incumbent by a landslide) unlike Russia or the parts of the country unfortunate enough to be under their control.
A coup was actually carried out by Russia in crimea. An actual coop where Russian soldiers surrounded the local government at gunpoint
> one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians.
This is false and shows you have no knowledge of Ukraine or Russia. Zelensky is from a minority group(Jewish) and is a native Russian speaker the current head of the army is an ethnic russian born in Russia.
That's not to mention how Russia treats ethnic minorities or even ethnic Russians in territories they capture
> This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future.
He invaded because he's an imperialist. It's pretty simple
> All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
You're imagining this was Americas fault. The only thing America could have done differently to prevent the war was if they somehow agreed to defend Ukraine or get all NATO members to agree to let them join.
shwouchk 22 days ago [-]
way behind the curve, and it still works plenty well both on this site as well as, very recently, to a comcast agent.
koiueo 22 days ago [-]
> the exceptions form the vast majorit
If majority opposed the war, it would be shameful to support it in public.
Think about it. Autocracy argument here is not relevant: you are not punished for being silent. But if you knew all the neighbors around you oppose something, you'd be ashamed to support it publicly. People are social creatures, and the fear of being rejected by your kind is deeply ingrained in everyone.
Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media. We see kids in Z swag on the streets. We see people signing up and participating in stealing/rapping/torturing/murdering.
If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up? They were not forced. Aren't they afraid of being judged by their neighbors? Are those 1 million sociopaths? Just statistically this doesn't add up.
So yeah, I'd suggest you drop your silly LLM argument, and go outside your bubble (I conclude you are in russia).
Ray20 21 days ago [-]
>Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media.
Mostly bots, minor officials, public sector employees and their relatives (they are forced to publish pro-war materials on their and their relatives social media under the threat of losing their jobs)
>If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up?
That's less than 1 percent. And keep in mind that to get that one percent, they are paid about 20x the average region salary every month.
>and go outside your bubble
Judging by your arguments, you are not in a bubble, you are directly broadcasting Putin's propaganda about popular support. And this is at a time when, to get his agenda in media, Putin has to sentence people to real prison terms not even for posts with condemnation of war on social media, but even for likes under such posts.
Ray20 22 days ago [-]
>Majority of russian population supports the unprovoked genocidal war
Yeah. And who doesn't support - went straight to gulag for 8-20 years. Fortunately, almost everyone there supports it, amazing unity.
outside1234 23 days ago [-]
He is just trying to show how it would feel if the shoe was on the other foot.
Ray20 22 days ago [-]
>They're not asking for global access to everyones data, the UK is.
They literally do.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 22 days ago [-]
Because they are ruthless crazy murderers? Because they want to turn us into radioactive ash (basically every day on Russian state TV)?
22 days ago [-]
throwaway48476 22 days ago [-]
DPRUK
kabdib 22 days ago [-]
this is at best a disingenuous argument
(russia and china would love to have access to that data. so would a lot of other governments)
1234letshaveatw 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
bayindirh 22 days ago [-]
The thing is, most people think that governments wants new tools for surveillance. The fact is, they had this power for a very long time (see Crypto A.G. and history of NSA and others), and practical and verifiable E2EE took these capabilities away.
Now they want their toys back. This is why the push is so hard and coming from everywhere at once.
mplewis9z 22 days ago [-]
I think this is an extreme take - they only had those mass surveillance tools since the start of the internet, and any other method of communication (phone calls, physical mail) all required warrants individualized to specific people to tap. But somehow the internet is excluded from all those privacy protections, and now that there’s technology available to ratchet us back to where we used to be, law enforcement agencies are throwing a tantrum about not being able to constantly violate our privacy.
In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.
bayindirh 22 days ago [-]
These (mass surveillance) programs go back to 60s, and it was already prevalent before internet was widespread, also internet was also under blanket surveillance way before. Moreover, this is not only limited to internet per se. Phone calls and any form of unencrypted communications are probably actively monitored for signals intelligence. We're not seeing laws related to this, because mechanisms are probably already in place.
So, I'm keeping my stance of "They want their tools back, because they had them before".
MobiusHorizons 22 days ago [-]
There are very strict laws against wiretapping on calls within the US. Warrants are required before the call can be recorded. That’s why there was so much controversy over blanket metadata collection.
thelittleone 22 days ago [-]
How to achive total pervasive surveillance? One step at a time where each step is not quite too much to cause rioting and revolution. Outrage has a very short attention span.
oneplane 23 days ago [-]
What stops them is one of two things:
Option 1: they operate a separate shard in that country and that shared is only accessible by that country. Companies like Apple, AWS, Cloudflare etc. have been doing it this way in China for a while now. Result: they can spy on the stuff in their country, but the only stuff in their country is their own stuff.
Option 2: no longer operate in an official capacity in that country. Have no people and no assets. Mostly works when the country is not a significant market. This usually means some things are only available grey market, black market or not at all. This is why certain products have lists of "supported countries" - it's not just ITAR stuff but also "we don't want to deal with their regime" stuff. Result: country gets nothing, no matter how loud they ask. Side-effect: you can't really risk your employees visiting such a country as they will be "leveraged".
polski-g 22 days ago [-]
Option 3: Cook talks to Trump and asks for tariffs in the UK until this demand is rescinded.
dathinab 23 days ago [-]
> If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile?
nothing
the first precedence of not-draft law here was Cloud Act I think
through I would be surprised if China doesn't "de-facto" requires Chineese companies operating outside of China (including Subsidiaries) to cooperate with their secret service in whatever way they want
and if we go back to the "crypto wars" of the ~2000th then there is a lot of precedence of similar law _ideas_ by the US which where turned down
similar we can't say for sure that there aren't secret US court orders which already did force apple to do "something like that" for the FBI or similar, SURE there is a lot of precedence of Apple pushing back against backdoor when it comes to police and offline device encryption, but one thing is in the public and the other fully in secret with gag orders and meant for usage in secret never seeing the light of courts so while it's somewhat unlikely it would be foolish to just assume it isn't the case, especially if we go forward one or two years with the current government...
Anyway UK might realize that now they have left the US they have very little power to force US tech giants to do anything _in the UK_ not even speaking about regulation which is a direct attack on the sovereignty of other states to own/control/decide about their population(s data).
IMHO ignoring the US for a moment because they are in chaos the EU, or at least some key EU states should make a statement that a UK backdoor allowing UK to access EU citizen data would be classified as espionage and isn't permittable if Apple wants to operate in the EU (but formulated to make it clear it's not to put pressure on Apple but on the UK). Sadly I don't see this happening as there are two many politcans which want laws like that, too. Often due to not understanding the implications undermining encryption has on national security, industry espionage and even protection of democracy as a whole... Sometimes also because they are greedy corrupt lobbyist from the industry which produces mass surveillance tools.
JusticeJuice 23 days ago [-]
There are tangentially similar precedents already, such as the American FACTA law. It is obviously a quite different context, as it just relates to financial information, not all information - but it's a law from the US government, that demands foreign companies send information back to the US.
The wild thing is that foreign companies actually do it. To avoid annoying the US, a lot of other governments ensure that the data is reported.
The US can get away with this through its immense power and economic influence (for the moment, at least). The UK is a small market of middling relevance, and their government's belief that they're a global power is an anachronism. I hope these decisions cause enough companies to break ties that they're forced to realize their position.
JusticeJuice 22 days ago [-]
Yeah totally, it only works due to their influence. The uk has nothing to backup these demands.
fauigerzigerk 23 days ago [-]
The key difference being that it is perfectly legal for the US to request data on income and gains received by US taxpayers while it is illegal for the US to spy (in certain ways) on US residents.
It is completely routine for countries to exchange data on financial accounts [1]. The only aspect that makes FATCA somewhat unusual is that the US taxes US persons even when they are residents of other countries.
Oh 100%, the content (and context) is completely different. The similarity I mean is a government passing a law that asks a foreign company to hand data over to them.
lmz 23 days ago [-]
It's legal in the same way this UK thing is legal - because there's a law justifying it. It may make more moral sense, depending on your political persuasion.
ExoticPearTree 22 days ago [-]
Actually the foreign banks have to do this, and if they don't and get caught, they will be barred from accessing the US financial market.
That is why, as a side effect, some refuse service to US citizens.
palmotea 23 days ago [-]
> what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile?
Realistically: Apple is a US company (with lots of foreign entanglements) with US leaders, and the US and UK are close allies with extradition treaties and the like. I'd expect the US government to put lots of pressure on Apple to prevent it from acting on such requests from Russia or China, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs would get slapped with espionage charges if they didn't head the warnings (especially if they "provide data on UK minister's phones").
unyttigfjelltol 23 days ago [-]
We are watching the redefinition of the idea of territorial sovereignty that emerged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. We in the US see our expectations of privacy shaped in the UK, and the reverse.
22 days ago [-]
Habgdnv 23 days ago [-]
Imagine Kim Jong-un goes to a few police stations in North Korea. It might not work on the first try, but eventually, he manages to trick one officer into believing that Trump threatened him on Facebook. Now, the police of a given country can legally request Apple to provide all information from Trump’s iCloud for an "investigation" into threats of violence— even if they are completely fabricated.
eru 22 days ago [-]
Or what's keeping the US from asking for Data, too.
NoMoreNicksLeft 23 days ago [-]
What if Apple just stops operating in the UK? They could start selling "English language" iPhones in France, let people go on a day trip if they wanted to buy them. There are ways of sidestepping this bullshit if you're an international company. Supposing they have any integrity, I mean. How far will the UK double down?
xp84 22 days ago [-]
I still don’t think the UK is a big enough market for Apple to be that worried about the following, but if the government and Apple escalate to the point of Apple pulling out of the UK, it would be pretty easy for the government to force all of its telecoms to ban any new iPhones from their mobile networks. So the citizens will probably not get to simply walk right around the restrictions that way, assuming the government is serious about this.
NoMoreNicksLeft 22 days ago [-]
So, any visiting American businessmen with iPhones are inconvenienced? What happens when that curtails investment?
I think Apple might just have some leverage here, if they choose to exert it. Starmer's government would, at minimum become a laughingstock.
Hell, do we know whether Chucky Three uses an Android? Or would the royals get a secret exemption?
MrScruff 22 days ago [-]
Given the desperation for economic growth in the UK, the idea that they would inflict such a massive bit of self harm on themselves over increased spying options is frankly ludicrous.
22 days ago [-]
cbsmith 22 days ago [-]
You lost me at "government thinks". ;-)
23 days ago [-]
8338550bff96 23 days ago [-]
At what point is this just extortionary cash grab from U.S. tech companies?
Want to fund some expensive grand program? Find a reason to fine U.S. companies.
eastbound 23 days ago [-]
Why not. Their hegemony is used as a weapon of war, since 1998 when Microsoft was condemned-but-not-penalized for its monopoly. Make it costly for USA to spy & conquer.
8338550bff96 23 days ago [-]
Let us see how that works out for you
arghwhat 23 days ago [-]
They might have to settle for it. The power of a government is not equal to what legislation they pass - they are heavily limited by the economic and publicity consequences of decisions.
As such, any outcome where this is enforced will be a compromise.
niemandhier 22 days ago [-]
That’s probably the reason apple is resisting. They are currently certified as moderately trust worthy for government operations in Germany. Giving in would invalidate that.
I mean, "Apple refuses to hand over private data to government at cost of UK business" is a pretty good headline.
lenerdenator 23 days ago [-]
Give me that sort of commitment to privacy and translucent colorful cases for future Macs and Tim Apple's got my money for the next five years at least.
docmars 23 days ago [-]
Give Apple a big enough incentive to negotiate with and they may very well cave. If I've learned anything about corporations, it's that money and incentives always speak louder than their purported values.
convolvatron 23 days ago [-]
this isn't apple weighing ethics against revenue. this is apple being forced to decide how much their pro-privacy marketing is really getting them in the market.
gessha 22 days ago [-]
Given that privacy is why my friends and I have iPhones, Apple will lose a lot of users and developers if they go back on privacy in any way.
mycall 22 days ago [-]
Linux based smartphones will sell like crazy at that point.
collyw 21 days ago [-]
Android are technically linux based.
I bought the Ubuntu phone. The phone was nice, but there were bareley any apps, and the maps app only worked online, which was useless outside of my home country. A dissapointment overall.
gessha 22 days ago [-]
That’s the utopia that I want to live in lol but in reality, I think GrapheneOS will pick up more users.
throwaway48476 22 days ago [-]
Apple doesn't give their Chinese customers any privacy.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
Yes, this would be something i would love to read
ExoticPearTree 22 days ago [-]
If Apple sticks to their guns, they can just stop doing business in the UK. And the UK government will have zero rights to demand anything from Apple.
bmelton 22 days ago [-]
In China, Apple limits end to end encryption and stores user data on state-owned servers. The Chinese app stores censors apps like the New York Times and Washington Post, disallows privacy apps like Signal, or any VPN that might bypass the great firewall.
I think the odds that they quit trying to earn the ~$100B annual revenues they get from the UK over this is closer to zero than 1
IshKebab 22 days ago [-]
They obviously don't care about privacy enough to fully withdraw from the UK! That would be insane.
gist 23 days ago [-]
Guess what? Trump will (hopefully) come to the rescue here. Don't laugh at that. I'd imagine he will be helpful possibly even with some of the EU rules such as in particular the one which makes even small US companies liable (as I recal) for notifying users of cookies on a website.
coolspot 23 days ago [-]
Tim Apple has been on inauguration, so very possible.
anonym29 22 days ago [-]
Is calling him Tim Apple some sort of inside joke I'm out of the loop on? We don't call Elon "Elon Tesla" or Satya "Satya Microsoft".
hackeman300 22 days ago [-]
The president has called him that on occasion
genewitch 22 days ago [-]
Once, and in context it was "Tim [at] Apple", because he loves to name drop like that." Any future mentions of Tim Apple by the president are tongue in cheek.
gist 21 days ago [-]
Probably correct for OP to present as "Tim Apple" (hence giving some kind of hint to reflect on)
anonym29 22 days ago [-]
TIL. Thank you!
kurikuri 21 days ago [-]
It’s odd, I wonder how that will interact with apple’s existing FIPS 140-2/3 certifications.
hackernewds 23 days ago [-]
I will stop using a service or hardware that could grant peaking rights into my folders to a possible administration like the one currently in the US. On day 1, zero hesitation
ForHackernews 23 days ago [-]
I have bad news for you...
mark_l_watson 22 days ago [-]
What is up with the UK? I have always loved my British friends and appreciated England’s history (setting aside their brutality during the British Empire). I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc. I just hope we in the USA don’t follow their lead.
Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
DrBazza 22 days ago [-]
We're governed by the most technically inept people possible.
The Peter Principle writ large.
I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job.
Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check.
Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check.
Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check.
That's where the UK is.
pfoof 22 days ago [-]
So at least we don't have to worry about anything. Apple can give them access to LLM generated SQLite rows and call it a day. Nobody would notice.
switch007 22 days ago [-]
The USA strongarming us after 9/11 didn't help. You don't have to look beyond the borders of the US to answer "what's up with the UK" when it comes to eg terrorism legislation
But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
kridsdale1 22 days ago [-]
> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc.
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
trompetenaccoun 22 days ago [-]
Yes but no, post WW2 the UK was one of the most liberal places in the world. Somehow things took a turn in the past two decades or so. And then around the 2020s the decline started to rapidly accelerate. The stories that have come out lately are really insane.
FreeTrade 22 days ago [-]
Economic decline fuels resentment towards immigrants and minority communities. Government becomes increasingly repressive to keep tensions from boiling over into riots and perhaps worse.
This is why countries are obsessed with growth - many things can be papered over with sufficient growth.
anonym29 22 days ago [-]
Call me crazy, but it seems probably unwise for any nation to be perpetually operating under "we're a bad recession away from ethno-nationalists starting a race war" as a default state of affairs.
tonyhart7 22 days ago [-]
well they accepted these people into their country in the first place
vidarh 22 days ago [-]
Most of the ethno-nationalists are born here.
cylemons 22 days ago [-]
they are clearly referring to the immigrants the ethno nationalists are againt
vidarh 21 days ago [-]
Yes, but my point is that the people that pose the greatest threat to stability are the ethno nationalists. The UK has them violently rioting just last year.
collyw 21 days ago [-]
250,000 gang rapes are another reason for hostility towards immigrants. As well as the cost.
porknubbins 22 days ago [-]
You can’t really put the UK surveillance state on a political left right axis though. Its an orthagonal trend where various Britains have always been trying to monitor each other for various purposes and that’s why it grows and grows. At least that’s how it looks to me as an outsider.
8note 22 days ago [-]
the UK has been ahead of the US on anti-liberal policies for the past decade or more.
bexit came before the trump election
anonym29 22 days ago [-]
do you have other examples? I have a limited perspective as an American, but I understand Brexit to have been more or less an exception to the way the political winds have generally been blowing in the UK in the last 15 years?
Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
DocTomoe 22 days ago [-]
Well, ever since the early 1990s the UK have been CCTV capital of the world, where you could not go to a neighborhood shop without being watched by the government in medium-to-large cities.
We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.
chgs 22 days ago [-]
Yet it’s a private American company that has the most cameras everywhere, with no control over them. I’m far more concerned about my neighbours ring camera than I am about a regulated public cctv system.
DocTomoe 21 days ago [-]
Yeah, you see, differently from nationstates, Amazon never built concentration camps, nor does it benefit their business model.
chgs 22 days ago [-]
Brexit was the tipping point. The “right wing” Tory party in power was progressive - gay marriage for example. This fell apart when the U.K. said it wanted more right wing and kicked out the Liberal Democrat’s. The leader of the Tories - Cameron - had to then rely on the right wing minority of his party and compromised with a referendum. This was lost by 4 percent and that was everything needed for 5 years of chaos, which then doubled down with the most statist intervention in centuries with covid.
Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.
throwaway48476 22 days ago [-]
They wanted to execute Thomas Paine so I'd say about then
Aetheridon 22 days ago [-]
all started after our guns were taken
sethd 22 days ago [-]
Perhaps. Another possibility is that the same societal shift that drove the UK to give up the right to be armed also pushed them in the direction of giving up other rights.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 22 days ago [-]
They broke Enigma code, and since then their spy agencies have overweight influence?
defrost 22 days ago [-]
Poland broke the Enigma code .. and built the first Bombes.
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
PaulRobinson 22 days ago [-]
Not quite right.
The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-)
In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded.
Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years.
The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished.
There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time.
That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
Detrytus 22 days ago [-]
So in short: Poles did all the important parts, like actually breaking the code, Brits just throwed some money at the problem, helping to scale the Bombs.
PaulRobinson 20 days ago [-]
No, not even close.
Nobody - even the Polish - can quantify the value of the each part of the process, but your rendering of what happened is clearly inaccurate by any and all reasonable measures.
shsbdncudx 21 days ago [-]
That’s wildly inaccurate to the point of trolling so I’ll leave it there
michaelg7x 22 days ago [-]
> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc.
Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.
leoc 22 days ago [-]
The war on terror was a big thing in the UK long before 2001—largely because there was in fact quite a lot of terrorism going on there, to be clear.
chgs 22 days ago [-]
30 years of US funded bombings across the U.K. stopped in 2001 so there’s that.
dead_gunslinger 22 days ago [-]
[dead]
zelphirkalt 22 days ago [-]
UK probably went wrong when they left the EU, which since then has done some work on data protection laws. Leaving the EU will probably turn out a mistake, but they could have, in some areas made it a positive thing. They could have made even stronger data protection and privacy laws for their citizen. They could have enforced them more than the EU enforces GDPR. These things do not happen because of uninformed and corrupt politicians. Trade is of course another area, where they could have tried to ensure, that they stick to EU quality and safety controls, to avoid lots of drama and headache. But it was difficult anyway, because if you stick to all things EU, then why leave in the first place? They would have to uphold standards and improve upon them, while being in a weaker position to negotiate with outside of EU partners.
GeekyBear 23 days ago [-]
> The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK
Agreed.
> Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
I feel like the UK always tries to do this w/ encryption. I don't know if it's a cultural sway GCHQ has on legislators and such but it happens w/ every generation of cryptography. Weren't they the one that neutered GSM encryption such that it was essentially ineffective from the get go?
tatersolid 22 days ago [-]
> Weren't they the one that neutered GSM encryption such that it was essentially ineffective from the get go?
The A5 cipher used in GSM came from France, but supposedly the Brits were also happy to have it be weak.
reverendsteveii 23 days ago [-]
You're assuming people's actual motivations match up with their stated motivations. If your motivation is to be re-elected to a government post by appearing to be tough on terrorism and drugs, every possible outcome of this course of action benefits you. Apple leaves? They were terrorist enablers and you're better off without them. Apple acquiesces? You're the David who took on Apple's goliath and won safety for everyone (again, regardless of whether this actually improves safety for anyone). Apple ignores you? You have an ongoing feud with Dangerous Big Tech that you can campaign and fundraise on for as long as it lasts.
altairprime 23 days ago [-]
The UK government can’t put Apple out of business; Apple can easily afford to simply exit all business in the UK. The UK is betting that Apple’s greed outweighs their principles. Long odds.
brundolf 22 days ago [-]
It's betting that the size of Apple's UK market is larger than the impact Apple's privacy marketing has on its worldwide market. Those odds aren't obvious to me
quacksilver 22 days ago [-]
Curious about what would happen if Apple withdrew from the UK and locked all devices with a message saying 'Your device has been disabled following the decision of the UK government to introduce new laws which mean service can no longer be offered in the UK', or something similar. They could base it on GPS or detected MCC codes.
I wonder if you would get anarchist riots until the law was removed. Many of the young with an expensive bricked iPhone (or parents whose kid's iPad was disabled) would probably side with Apple over already unpopular politicians...
reaperducer 23 days ago [-]
The UK is betting that Apple’s greed outweighs their principles. Long odds.
Three weeks ago, I would have agreed with you.
Then Tim Cook wrote a check for $1,000,000.00 to help pay for Donald Trump's inauguration party.†
In spite of what they led us to believe over the last couple of decades, Tim Cook and Apple are no different than any of the other tech companies genuflecting before the new emperor, whose stated goals are the opposite of the "mission, vision and values" lies we were fed by the tech industry.
As Apple isn’t based in the UK and owes no fealty to their government. I don’t agree that your citation is relevant here. Apple is a US company. Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices, however uncomfortable that is to consider. Revoking privacy guarantees globally, reversing years of public opinion gains overnight, is not. The UK cannot do anything to materially harm Apple in any way that Apple can’t afford short of sending a double-oh to Cupertino.
mig39 21 days ago [-]
> Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices
What does that mean? Who is the gay founder? Of Apple?
collyw 21 days ago [-]
I assume he is referring to Tim Cook, who isn't a founder, but he is gay if I remember correctly.
8note 22 days ago [-]
the UK could force a sale of apple assets to whatever degree theyre happy with for apple's new owner to keep operating in the UK
crooked-v 22 days ago [-]
That sounds like the kind of thing that would lead to the countries where those assets are actually located saying "haha, no".
talldayo 23 days ago [-]
> As Apple isn’t based in the UK and owes no fealty to their government
Apple isn't based in China, they owe nothing to them either. Apple's willingness to backdoor and modify their services for actual authoritarianism is well[0] documented[1], at no point did they ever threaten to leave the respective markets. Every single spectator knows that Apple leaving these markets would be an admission of guilt.
> Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices
That hasn't been "sensible corporate practice" since American civil rights were instated. If that is the real motivation for Apple to pen their donation, it would be even more pathetic than a global encryption backdoor. It's not "uncomfortable" to consider, it's illegally discriminatory to a nonsense extent.
What both of you are overlooking, and clearly what this entire thing is about, is antitrust enforcement. Tim Cook knows that Apple cannot survive if they are investigated by a fair commission, so he's trying to manipulate Trump into dropping the DOJ's cases, giving Apple unfair advantages vis-a-vis China and pressuring the EU into stopping their regulation. This is literally surface-level stuff if you even remotely understand Apple's commitment to shareholders and what drives their hardware and software margins in 2025. Everything else is advertisement and a chasing after wind.
Apple needs China. It's a big market that still manufactures most iPhones, despite their efforts to change that. The surveillance bill the UK has passed is in some ways worse than China's (a UK shard would not satisfy it), and the UK is far less important.
talldayo 23 days ago [-]
I'm well aware. It's a star-crossed romance that is bound to end during this administration. It should have ended a long time ago, Apple simply wanted to exploit the ambiguity of America's politics until it no longer benefit them.
I suspect, no different from the iPhone adopting USB-C or the App Store adhering to EU legislation, Apple needs the UK as well. It really isn't as simple as walking away from certain markets, and even if Apple did abandon it they would still be subject to warrantless surveillance from the UK via Five Eyes.
int_19h 23 days ago [-]
One thing of note in those other cases is that they only required Apple to comply wrt its customers in the jurisdiction of the country in question. So in China, everything is backdoored, but it doesn't affect users elsewhere.
In this case, the claim is that UK wants global backdoors, so Apple cannot comply quite so easily.
altairprime 22 days ago [-]
China is not the UK, and isn’t comparable, any more than the US was. Apple’s manufacturing is far more dependent on China than it is the UK, with one exception: Arm. Legitimately, if the UK government declare Arm to be unexportable to the US, they can completely fuck over everyone except Apple, who I expect has a Complete Code license or equivalent so that they can continue development of Arm goes bankrupt or gets cut off from international trade.
A better question that supports the point here is:
Which of the world’s countries are able to materially damage Apple’s ability to transact business in other countries?
Those countries hold serious and real leverage over Apple, because Apple can’t just walk away from doing business in that one country without having their business impacted elsewhere. The UK is not on my version of that list, but if you’ve a good reason why it should be, that’s the missing data here and that’s invaluable leverage to recognize. (It may well also already be documented in Apple’s financials.)
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
The ARM licensing bit hasn't been relevant since SoftBank bought ARM. The preeminent issue is that Apple is already perfectly fine with warrantless surveillance and didn't leave the EU, US or anyone over it. This expectation for Apple to grow a San-Bernadino-esque backbone in an age where they manufacture backdoors for Five Eyes is hilarious.
Apple has nothing to fear from antitrust because it has no market power. It is an expensive premium product in every category in which it operates and there wre numerous cheaper alternatives in those categories.
The delusion of people on this website thinking that Apple, a minority supplier of cellphones, is somehow a monopoly. LOL is the only reply I can think of.
Miraste 23 days ago [-]
Of course Apple doesn't have principles, they're a for-profit company. What's in question here is whether they believe the UK is financially worth opening this can of worms. Following US government whims is good business for them in almost all cases, but that math isn't the same for the UK.
ustad 23 days ago [-]
For $1 million, you’re promised intimate access to Trump and his inner circle. This isn’t just about tradition or unity-it’s about buying influence and maintaining power. In a world where we’re supposedly pushing for fairness, equality, and transparency, this feels incredibly hypocritical. It’s as if we’re endorsing a system where money talks louder than public interest or ethical considerations. It makes you wonder where the line is between modern capitalism and a system that operates more like an oligarchy.
22 days ago [-]
IshKebab 22 days ago [-]
> Apple can easily afford to simply exit all business in the UK.
Apple has shareholders, so no it can't (or more precisely, Tim Cook can't).
hollerith 22 days ago [-]
Google had shareholders in 2005 too or thereabouts when they publicly decided to abandon the Chinese search market for soft, fuzzy reasons (i.e., not because they were losing money on Chinese operations).
And as far as I know, they're still absent from the Chinese search market.
lakjsljlkj 23 days ago [-]
Sounds like you're assuming that UK's goal is to stop criminals. I don't think that's their goal. I think that's their cover story.
As for Apple, their daily/hourly/whatever fines might be less than cost of a major ad campaign if they were to buy that publicity directly. Sounds like a good deal for them to refuse to honor the request.
chrisjj 22 days ago [-]
So what is the goal?
mtillman 23 days ago [-]
A backdoor for one is an opportunity for many. Given the UK is completely incapable of outspending most of the world on compute, this effectively hands their enemies that data they’re looking for.
pentel-0_5 22 days ago [-]
Yep. It's the creation of an artificial Hobson's choice: "do this, or I'm breaking up with you."
xp84 22 days ago [-]
Yes, encryption is one of the most “cat’s out of the bag” situations - even assuming every company worldwide is cowed into submission by governments to add back doors, all they’re going to be catching is the dumb and unsophisticated criminals and even that will diminish as even the dummies realize every text and call is wiretapped once people start seeing their private communiques come out in court.
I suppose there are people in the camp advocating for back doors who still think it’s worth the tremendous downsides to be able to catch that group of criminals (there are certainly plenty of idiot criminals), but anybody can just use plain GPG emails for free, or deploy some open source encrypted chat server on a $20 a month cloud instance… and I assume operators in places like Russia or China won’t mind hosting easy services for less nerdy criminals willing to pay in crypto.
gspetr 22 days ago [-]
> the dumb and unsophisticated criminals
This appears to be majority of them if Brian Krebs is to be trusted. Very few have proper OPSEC, fewer still are disciplined enough to prevent cross contaminating their virtual identities.
Even if you keep your communications airtight, boneheaded decisions when they move the money from cyberspace into meatspace are quite common: people living way beyond their means, 22 y/o's buying $200K+ cars without proper income records get caught quickly once people start looking.
sneak 23 days ago [-]
> The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor.
First, these are the same thing.
Second, ADP is already off by default so approximately nobody uses it. It is irrelevant from a privacy standpoint whether or not they offer it.
shwouchk 23 days ago [-]
ADP is a relatively new thing. it makes sense to roll it out gradually both from engineering POV as well as marketing.
Further, as all other forms of e2ee, it makes you responsible for the encryption keys.
As a user on the platform I am quite happy it is offered. Considering that these days it is quite difficult not to have a mobile device associated with “you” (you open links sent to “you” on your mobile device? consider that device compromised from privacy perspective), id rather it be on the platform with stronger protections.
karel-3d 23 days ago [-]
UK government wants a backdoor access to all users, worldwide, irrespective of their nationality.
throwaway48476 22 days ago [-]
The UK needs to be reminded of 1776 before they reprise what gave rise to the 4th ammendment.
noduerme 22 days ago [-]
Apple should and can just sever its relationship with the British public and let them reap the consequences of submitting to their nanny state.
Although it's worth wondering why anyone would use any type of corporate cloud backup, anyway. Certainly if you had anything worth hiding, you would disable that first. That just makes this whole endeavor that much more dubious.
thewileyone 20 days ago [-]
If just turning off ADP placates the UK, it implies that the UK already has a backdoor to unencrypted data.
st3fan 23 days ago [-]
"It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just move it somewhere else with encryption."
This. Whether it is an app to install on your phone or desktop or simply a website to use. People who need encryption to make sure their communication is private will _easily_ find ways around any kind of government snooping.
hassleblad23 23 days ago [-]
Governments have much more power than global companies, even though it seems that they are untouchable from the outside.
KurSix 22 days ago [-]
Anyone with serious intent to hide something will just use another encrypted service or self-host their data...
SilasX 23 days ago [-]
>I don't think the UK government would try to put Apple out of business if they don't comply it's more likely that they would just get heavily fined until they do so.
Sufficiently advanced "escalating fines until they comply" is indistinguishable from "putting them out of business".
tonyedgecombe 22 days ago [-]
The government would soon cave if Apple started disinvesting in the UK. The current government are desperate for growth.
matt-p 22 days ago [-]
I honestly don't even think we'd fine them real money, it would be too unfriendly to business. So what's this? I think political posturing or at worst the worlds weakest bargaining chip.
fossuser 22 days ago [-]
Maybe USG will now stand behind American companies and push back on this sort of thing? Enough of the EU or UK fining US companies over bullshit. In this case it's also better for the UK consumers too.
> requires that Apple creates a back door that allows UK security officials unencumbered access to encrypted user data worldwide
How could this even be enforced if Apple pulls out cloud services of the UK ?
It's such a ridiculous request, the British Intelligence agencies must be bored coming up with new ways to make Apple look good.
TrueDuality 23 days ago [-]
As long as Apple has a business presence in the UK, they are subject to the laws the UK imposes on them even if they're vastly overreaching and impose on other government's citizens. Not supporting cloud services wouldn't be sufficient to avoid the compliance requirement, they would have to formerly stop doing business in the UK.
Looking at the market size that might be a decision that Apple is willing to make as it would most likely be a temporary stick. The government can spin it anyway they want, but Apple devices do not work basically at all without the deep integration of their services. A geoblock would effectively mean UK citizens would be left with unusable devices and I can't see the resulting outrage being directed exclusively at Apple.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out for sure.
bilekas 22 days ago [-]
I think this is the most solid answer I’ve seen so far that makes any sense. Could they still go through with it , I’m not sure, they want to project some influence but I still feel this is like haggling for half price to get cost.
Someone else here said something spot on for me, we’re all focusing on how bat sh*t this is because it’s global without even considering how human privacy obligations are just ignored.
Humans have a right to privacy, feels unbelievably pretentious and privileged to even say that. But it’s still true
hx8 22 days ago [-]
Imagine weighing the right of privacy of everyone in the world against the right of safety of 0.8% of the world population.
VWWHFSfQ 23 days ago [-]
> As long as Apple has a business presence in the UK, they are subject to the laws the UK imposes on them even if they're vastly overreaching and impose on other government's citizens.
I wonder if this means that Apple would ultimately take the same approach that they have in China, where the iCloud data and services are entirely localized within China and allows the Chinese government unrestricted access.
aucisson_masque 23 days ago [-]
one can't compare china and the uk.
china had leverage because of the manufacturing happening over there and the incredible market opportunity, UK doesn't have much.
technically i believe apple could get out of the UK market to provoke a backslash on the government.
If they concede, other government will use the exact same blackmailing technique and one can say it will be the absolute end of their "privacy" marketing campaign they spent so much money into.
dwaite 23 days ago [-]
Apple offers the same escrowed key and non-escrowed key (advanced data protection) features in China as far as I'm aware. The extra capability GCBD has would be access to protected at rest data like iCloud email.
afro88 23 days ago [-]
The decision wouldn't involve just market size, but their Irish tax haven as well. They're not going to pull out of the UK entirely.
eric_h 23 days ago [-]
Their Irish tax haven is rather specifically _not_ in the UK.
booi 23 days ago [-]
yeah isn't it in... you know... Ireland?
nichohel 23 days ago [-]
There is the Republic of Ireland, not in UK, and Northern Ireland, in UK.
22 days ago [-]
chrisjj 22 days ago [-]
And Apple's "haven" is in Republic of Ireland, so no, not UK.
gardenhedge 22 days ago [-]
fyi, if you see Ireland or Irish mentioned it nearly always refers to the Republic of Ireland.
miningape 22 days ago [-]
Oh American education system please never change
tonyedgecombe 22 days ago [-]
I’ve met a few fellow brits who don’t know the difference.
afro88 22 days ago [-]
Apologies for any offense given. Total brain fart moment. If I could delete this comment I would
martinsnow 23 days ago [-]
Go ahead and call someone from Ireland, British.
disgruntledphd2 22 days ago [-]
In the north about 50% will be ok with it.
lakis 22 days ago [-]
Ireland is in EU. UK is not in EU anymore
cmsj 23 days ago [-]
Apple still has legal entities in the UK. Pulling out cloud services would be insufficient to prevent the UK authorities from interfering with their activities.
bilekas 23 days ago [-]
> prevent the UK authorities from interfering with their activities
I'm still missing how this could be enforced ? To my layman understanding, this reads the same as if China said : "Meta, Tesla, Valve etc has entities in China therefore we get to see all data they store in the EU and the US.
The UK has Zero jurisdiction in Ireland for example where a lot of EU data may be stored.
elashri 23 days ago [-]
I have lived to the day that we give an example on china not doing something stupid a western democracy does about rights and freedom. Wild times to be alive. I am also surprised that they demand worldwide access and not just UK users data or all the data stored in UK jurisdiction. But this is going too far.
jibe 23 days ago [-]
China has forced Apple to outsource iCloud in China to a state run company, so all data is just directly controlled by the government there. It’s an even worse situation.
That is just China's general rules around tech. Awful? Yes. But not a global issue. Most non-chinese companies are forced to have their chinese properties ran by a chinese company.
This is shown by companies like VW having cars made in china with effectively a license model, these cars are designed and built by a third party with a few interesting exceptions (VW actually licensed a design, the Taos, back and shipped it worldwide)
The insane overreach was the UK wanting data on people not in the UK
csomar 23 days ago [-]
How is this worse? This only affects users in China.
lern_too_spel 23 days ago [-]
And users who communicate with users in China using Apple services.
GoblinSlayer 23 days ago [-]
They can send encrypted PGP messages, e2e was figured out in 1991.
Spivak 23 days ago [-]
We literally tried to do this with TikTok. We can't exactly stand on a high-horse when the highest level of government in the US was totally fine with it.
Our noble "we can't have American data in the hands of our enemies," their savage "forcing American companies to turn over user data."
compootr 22 days ago [-]
I disagree. Apple is a hardware company but TT is a shithole social media
in other words, you store much more data on a phone versus a doomscrolling app[*]
*: unless you make videos and publish PII in them :)
flaminHotSpeedo 23 days ago [-]
Edit: I misread the comment tree, I thought this comment was equating the TikTok situation to the UK's request.
I agree that the TikTok demands are pretty similar, though I might quibble over whether they're literally the same, since arrangements like that are the status quo in China but not in the US
Original comment below:
How is "remove foreign control of data on our nation's users" remotely the same as "give us access to foreign users' data"?
They're not even figuratively the same, despite you literally misusing that word
joshuaissac 23 days ago [-]
It's not clear which scenario you are referring to.
If by "give us access to foreign users' data", you mean TikTok, then ByteDance is only required to sell the US portion of TikTok to American buyers. If you mean iCloud, then Apple is only required to keep Chinese users' data on local servers.
flaminHotSpeedo 23 days ago [-]
Oh my bad, I misread the comment tree and thought this comment was a response to the grandparent.
"give us access to foreign users' data" referred to what the UK is asking for, I thought the post i was replying to was equating the UK's request to the US'
joseppudev 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
guappa 23 days ago [-]
At least the CIA doesn't get it… dunno which is worse.
pjmlp 23 days ago [-]
It is worse than that, I never expected that most democracies would go back to foregone days, because people get sold out on populism and decided to ignore history lessons.
As a child of Portuguese revolution, I am aware of plenty of stories, apparently many folks nowadays think those are stories to scare misbehaved kids.
mathw 23 days ago [-]
And if you think China and the USA and Russia wouldn't want it... hey I've got this bridge for sale.
bluGill 23 days ago [-]
There are tensions in the US.
Those who are charged with stopping cyber crime are very must against this. End to End encryption is one of the better protections they can give you against foreign hackers and they want you to use it.
Meanwhile down the hall are people who are charged with investigating crimes someone in the country commits and they are want this. It is a lot easier to prove someone is involved in some crime if a warrant can get their data, but end to end encryption means they can only get random bytes. (of course they don't want warrants either, but that is a different issue not relevant here so they will specify warrants in this debate)
idle_zealot 23 days ago [-]
The difference is that China and Russia have the sense to spy on foreign citizens with hackers, trackers, and other covert means. Somehow the UK feels entitled to Apple doing their espionage for them, and has the gall to ask publicly.
Note that this is not China apologia: they do the same brazen shit locally, but they're an authoritarian regime. I have lower expectations for human rights there.
It can be enforced in this way: police raids the local headquarters and jail a bunch of people because their company didn't comply with the law.
The only way to prevent that is not having any local office, no employees, nothing. Sell physical objects only by the means of local 3rd party resellers which will import goods. Same thing for services. Of course they can ban imports and services or go after those 3rd parties. It depends how nasty they want to be.
elcritch 23 days ago [-]
I suspect the UK government would back down way before Apple. People aren’t politically active as those of years pass, but brick their iPhones you’d have a riot.
insane_dreamer 23 days ago [-]
> I'm still missing how this could be enforced ?
By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
The US used a similar strategy decades ago to break Swiss Bank Secrecy laws (either Swiss banks had to give up the info or they were going to be kicked out of the US).
bilekas 23 days ago [-]
> By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
As someone else here said, Apple would 100% call this bluff. And you can be certain the UK won't have the US to put pressure on Apple for them. All the would happen is the UK Apple users would be with an expensive paperweight.
HDThoreaun 23 days ago [-]
UK can just start fining apple billions of dollars if they dont want to fully kick them out of the country.
369548684892826 22 days ago [-]
Actually, maybe this is what the government's end goal is. Free money!
mahkoh 23 days ago [-]
That assumes that Apple's shareholders believe that Apple's privacy reputation (relative to other companies) is more valuable than access to the UK market.
All evidence that I have seen suggests that consumers by and large do not care about this kind of privacy. They do not buy iPhones instead of other phones due to the privacy properties.
Therefore Apple's shareholders could order Apple to stay in the UK market.
And if not, then Apple's customers could be compensated with money and other UK-held assets that the government could confiscate.
insane_dreamer 23 days ago [-]
This is usually true of any corp. However, Apple is the one big tech company that has built its reputation on privacy more than any other, and Cook in particular is very strong on that -- and he's not prone to Zuck-like flip/flopping, at least not so far.
You may be right, of course. But if there's one tech company who _might_ say "no", it's Apple.
Counterpoint: Apple in China.
pmontra 23 days ago [-]
According to NASDAQ [1] the two main investors are Vanguard and Blackrock, but the two of them together are far away from 50%. There are a number of other large investors. I didn't do the sums but there must be probably 30 of them to get to 50%. Do some of them care about privacy of common people? Probably not. About the people in their boards? Probably yes.
Most users don't care about that stuff, but I think a small but significant percentage do. I have never been an Apple fan but I am aware that they are significantly better than Windows and Andorid for security and privacy.
bluGill 23 days ago [-]
Swiss banks didn't care - they didn't have a large Us presence anyway. Until the US started enforcing this by proxy, other banks couldn't do business with you and the US and overall the US is more important to the world than Swiss banks.
insane_dreamer 23 days ago [-]
Not so sure. Yeah, they didn't have a large US presence but they did a lot of business with US banks and securities markets -- that's what was threatened. It's wasn't the ability to have branches in the US but the ability to conduct business in US markets.
mohamedattahri 23 days ago [-]
Yep, and the US had a lot more leverage; out of the US translates into no access to US dollars either directly or via a correspondent bank, which essentially means bankruptcy.
throw0101c 23 days ago [-]
> By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
To use poker terminology: I think that if the UK made this bet that Apple would call.
JoshTriplett 23 days ago [-]
I really hope so. I would love to see that showdown. Hopefully, "can't buy an iPhone in the UK and everyone knows why" makes the Snooper's Charter a radioactive mess that legislators fall all over themselves to repeal.
chrisjj 22 days ago [-]
I don't see how closing Apple UK would mean "can't buy an iPhone in the UK". Importing is a thing.
JoshTriplett 21 days ago [-]
In which case, Apple still wins by not having to put in a backdoor.
elcritch 23 days ago [-]
Exactly, imagine the legislatures facing their irate teen daughters for bricking Apple devices.
izacus 23 days ago [-]
Apple stockholders would never allow that.
throw0101c 23 days ago [-]
> Apple stockholders would never allow that.
Then they can vote in a board of directors that agrees with them, and have that board fire Tim Cook.
I would hazard to guess that you'll see an exodus of a lot of folks leaving Apple either because (a) they won't follow that order, or (b) in solidarity with those that are fired.
Reminder that privacy is feature that Apple touts (how much you believe them is up to you):
> On January 28, 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered remarks at Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference: Enforcing Rights in a Changing World. The virtual conference — hosted annually in Brussels, Belgium — is one of the foremost international privacy and technology conferences bringing together leaders from academia, government, civil society and the private sector. Learn more about the features and controls Apple provides users to safeguard their privacy at http://www.apple.com/privacy
I don't know where your ideas are coming from - Apple easily folded and gave all data to Chinese government when commanded to do so under leadership of Tim Cook.
Where does your thinking that they'll suddenly forget about revenue from UK over this come from?
throw0101c 23 days ago [-]
> Where does your thinking that they'll suddenly forget about revenue from UK over this come from?
This is not just a case of the British intelligence services secretly “tapping into” Irish telephonic and internet traffic via land and maritime cables. Rather in most cases they are being provided free (or commercial) access to the information by companies associated with the use, ownership or maintenance of these cables.
Post-Snowden the Irish government retroactively legalised it...
amelius 23 days ago [-]
> I'm still missing how this could be enforced ?
Basically by saying that if they don't comply, they can't do business in the UK.
bluGill 23 days ago [-]
There are lots of different ways to do business. UK is unlikely to be able to ban the iphone, and I doubt Apple has much business in the UK. As such they can lay off all workers in the UK "because of legal issues" and the workers feel the pain. They can still sell in the UK through third parties, and go to the EU if you need warranty work
narag 23 days ago [-]
The phone itself is only a piece. Apple sells multiple services, without them the phone is useless. If you can't access the appstore, the backups, etc. what good is an iPhone? Now, the UK can say that UK citizens' data can't travel outside of the UK without the UK government permission.
So it's still a problem. This seems like a looming PR battle.
chrisjj 22 days ago [-]
> Now, the UK can say that UK citizens' data can't travel outside of the UK without the UK government permission.
How so?
narag 16 days ago [-]
Same as GDPR forbids the same thing from EU.
gnfargbl 23 days ago [-]
Except perhaps for people living near the border in Northern Ireland, "going to the EU" for warranty work is a completely unfeasible suggestion. It's not exactly a short or cheap journey for most of us!
bluGill 23 days ago [-]
You don't have to go in person. Put it in the mail. In person can get same day service though. Next day mail is expensive, but you can get it (and if Apple is serious they can partner with the next day mail and do overnight repairs.). It isn't uncommon for someone to ship you are replacement device and then you ship your broken one back after the new arrives (if the old is only partially broke this can be useful). Apple has a lot of options to make this not too inconvenient.
Though will Apple blink is still unknown. Just because they can doesn't mean they will.
gnfargbl 23 days ago [-]
The UK public would never accept this. There's basically almost no interest in E2EE at all, but the idea of not being able to take your iPhone to the Apple Store would be riot-inducing. And I think the average Brit would be more comfortable posting their phone to the US than to France.
If Apple really has the guts to stare this one down, then I would expect it's the government who blinks.
tzs 23 days ago [-]
That got me curious. Google maps says that from London to the Apple store in Lille, France is about 4 hours by car, and the same for the return trip. Googling suggests that it would be about £120 for round trip transport through the tunnel.
It says that by train it is about 90 minutes each way and would cost about the same as the car trip.
extraduder_ire 23 days ago [-]
Ireland doesn't have a single apple store in it. The closest thing that exists are stores in their authorised reseller program.
tzs 22 days ago [-]
If the reseller is also an Apple authorized service provider that should find. They have genuine Apple parts and can do warrant and AppleCare work.
Not sure it would be worth it though, unless you are in Northern Ireland. If you are someplace more like London it would be a lot faster to go to the nearest Apple Store in France and a lot cheaper.
gnfargbl 23 days ago [-]
That's really odd -- Belfast but not Dublin? Why?
patrickmay 23 days ago [-]
"Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance. Americans think 100 years is a long time."
genewitch 22 days ago [-]
It's ~40 miles round trip to go to a grocery store. And that's a crappy store, better ones are an additional 5-10 miles.
In the US.
freetanga 23 days ago [-]
It is a relatively small market, and if Apple decides to shut down while flooding the streets of London with posters saying “We are forced by your government to shut down in order to uphold your privacy”, the UK
Government would take a massive blow.
Imagine Russian Oligarchs on android devices! Polonium will roll, I tell you!
wqaatwt 23 days ago [-]
So if British voters get to chose between having access to iPhones or voting for a government that wants to spy on them at whatever the cost surely the choice must be clear?
hedora 23 days ago [-]
The US CLOUD act says something similar to your straw man (though it doesn't ban E2E encryption like the UK is attempting to do):
Note that it the bar is having the ability to access the server, so this law is completely incompatible with most GPDR solutions: It's illegal to store European user data and then refuse to hand it over to US law enforcement, regardless of whether the data is stored in Europe or the request breaks European law.
RobotToaster 23 days ago [-]
I imagine they would fine apple a large sum of money. If apple refuse to pay they send high court sheriffs to confiscate any property they have in the UK to pay the debt.
mattlondon 22 days ago [-]
The opposite is happening all the time - i.e. US demanding access to European data from Facebook and Google et al. It is not one-sided.
layer8 23 days ago [-]
It would be enforced by fining the UK legal entities (or worse, like charging their legal representatives) if they don't comply. If the UK is serious about this, the only alternative for Apple would eventually be to completely cease operations in the UK.
By the way, this is similar to why for true GDPR compliance, data centers should be operated by EU companies that aren't subsidiaries of US companies, because even if the latter operate data centers located in the EU, they would still be bound to secret orders by the US government.
p0w3n3d 23 days ago [-]
The most horrible part of the discussion we're making is that we're arguing that UK intelligence should be able to access only UK related data, and not that UK intelligence should not undermine privacy of people
idle_zealot 23 days ago [-]
The Overton Window has shifted.
int_19h 22 days ago [-]
Has it? UK has a long-standing reputation as one of the most persistent surveillance nanny states in the West.
Mountain_Skies 23 days ago [-]
The Clipper Chip died a quick death back when the Clinton administration wanted it, as the push back against it was pretty strong. Now? Seems like a matter of time before every form of electronic communication has a dozen different back, side, and front doors into it.
extraduder_ire 23 days ago [-]
I don't think that was mandated to be used for every device though. It was also shown to perform key escrow in secret and had its security defeated before it launched.
throw0101c 23 days ago [-]
PSA:
The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse.
[…]
The political commentator Joshua Treviño has postulated that the six degrees of acceptance of public ideas are roughly:[7]
unthinkable
radical
acceptable
sensible
popular
policy
What we're discussing here is whether a private company should obey laws of the country they operate in or not.
wqaatwt 23 days ago [-]
The moral thing to do would be to resist obeying such laws as much as is feasible. If that fails close all your legal entities and continue offering services to the citizens of that country to the extent that is feasible.
Of course it wouldn’t be very profitable. So unfortunately you really can’t expect a major public company to take a stand like in a case like this.
p0w3n3d 23 days ago [-]
Fully agree. Imagine giving your data to company XYZ which promises you full encryption privacy. The company XYZ opens a subdivision in country CBA and all's okay unless CBA's law is changed to mandate all companies to give all their data. Now your data is lost to CBA's agents.
wqaatwt 23 days ago [-]
Surely if the current government were dumb enough to try and ban Apple from the UK over something like this it would it would make even Truss look competent in comparison.
Not so much because British people love their iPhones to such a extreme degree but because they willing to waste money and resources over something this stupid.
IMHO Apple could bring down the government that tried this if they really wanted to.
miroljub 23 days ago [-]
That's actually the only thing that would keep Apple services usable to everyone else around the world.
bilekas 23 days ago [-]
> By the way, this is similar to why for true GDPR compliance, data centers should be operated by EU companies that aren't subsidiaries of US companies, because even if the latter operate data centers located in the EU, they would still be bound to secret orders by the US government.
This is interesting, I know GDPR does not mandate data localization but I was under the impression that the requirements are a bit more difficult/stringent for transferring data out of the EU region ? While not perfect, it's a bit less 'open door' than it would be if it was hosted in the US.
michaelt 23 days ago [-]
The EU has a law saying "don't transfer data out of the EU without the right paperwork, but of course if your American sysadmins have SSH access to servers in the EU to do maintenance that's no problem, just tell them not to copy the data off it"
The US has a law saying "If our spies tell American sysadmins to SSH into a server in the EU and copy data off it, they must do it and they must keep it secret"
kstrauser 23 days ago [-]
I’ve never worked in a company with data the gov’t cared about that wouldn’t have sirens going off. Why is Joe SSHing into the EU data center? And now why’s he trying to turn off the GuardDuty rule that caught him? And why is he trying to delete that from CloudTrail? And why is the SOC 2 auditor asking why he has access to delete things from CloudTrail in the first place?”
You’d have to get a surprising number of people to go along with it.
michaelt 23 days ago [-]
That's why it's important to choose a sysadmin who has the authority to SSH to servers. Joe SSHes in all the time, it's not an anomaly.
If you think a SOC2 auditor would spot something like this, in a company the size of Apple or Google - you've probably never been through a SOC2 audit :)
kstrauser 23 days ago [-]
I wish that I had not been through many SOC 2 audits. But the point was just that in a sufficiently large org that might have cross-continent data centers, it’s not common to have one person who can access remote data and cover their trail and turn off the alarms and all the other things required to do it surreptitiously. Possible? Maybe. Likely? Probably not.
michaelt 23 days ago [-]
In my experience, every sufficiently large org with data centres on multiple continents has an accretion of legacy systems and special exceptions.
And a heuristic anomaly detection system that generates masses of false alarms, and enough different teams and documents and policies to bury an army of SOC2 auditors. And so many log lines almost anything can get lost in the noise.
The janitors always have keys to everything. Especially when it’s required by law.
23 days ago [-]
sandworm101 23 days ago [-]
More importantly, apple has customers in the UK. The business from captured apple users is more valuable than apple's privacy reputation.
This all seems very similar to RIM and the aftermath of the riots in the UK. The backdoors became too obvious for customers to ignore. Did not go well for RIM in the market afterwards.
thewebguyd 23 days ago [-]
> More importantly, apple has customers in the UK. The business from captured apple users is more valuable than apple's privacy reputation.
Is it though? I wonder how much of Apple's revenue is from the UK, probably around 5-6%? Apple isn't exactly as popular in the rest of the world as they are in the US.
Would damaging their privacy reputation globally be more valuable than the UK market? I honestly don't know, but my hunch says no - they are likely to want to keep their reputation and dump the UK market. I think more likely is Apple is going to be able to get the UK to cave in. Apple is extremely competent with PR, and would be able to spin any kind of pull-out or degraded service in the UK as the government's choice and fault, to the ire of UK citizens.
wqaatwt 23 days ago [-]
Who has more to lose though? I mean any government that would do something as stupid as banning Apple because Apple didn’t allow it to spy on its citizens wouldn’t be very popular or last that long..
I mean this would be even more stupid than Partygate and the whole Truss debacle put together.
bnjms 23 days ago [-]
> the British Intelligence agencies must be bored coming up with new ways to make Apple look good.
We know they collude with US intelligence serviceUS
scarface_74 23 days ago [-]
But as far as we know there is no encryption back door
tacomagick 23 days ago [-]
"As far as we know" is the most important part.
madeofpalk 23 days ago [-]
It seems apparent to me that Apple leaked this information to US press in an attempt to get the UK to back off. Wouldn't Apple also try to subvert the attempt for US intelligence to get a backdoor? Or do we think Apple has less of a leg to stand on with US and would be more likely to roll over?
autoexec 23 days ago [-]
> Or do we think Apple has less of a leg to stand on with US and would be more likely to roll over?
Apple has no leg to stand on at all. When the NSA comes to your door and demands access to everything you have you don't get to say no. There is no court you can appeal to, and they'll take whatever they want and order you to keep your mouth shut about it. They'll walk right into your headquarters and data centers, force you to move your employees so they can set up an office for themselves on your property, insert their equipment into your network directly and take everything just like they did with AT&T decades ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)
Your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit) and I'm not even sure the US government would allow "shut down" as an option in some cases. It seems likely that they'd keep a massive target like Apple running even if the owners of the company wanted to cease operations, but lets be honest, Apple makes a lot of people very very rich so they'd never walk away from that. They'll keep making their money and just try to convince themselves that the US are the "good guys" and so it must be okay.
Obviously, Apple is going to comply with US federal law, given that their headquarters and employees are there, as well as their most profitable market. But when possible, they have shown themselves willing to fight against intrusion.
ethersteeds 23 days ago [-]
Two things,
First, that's notably the FBI and not NSA. As gp says, NSA has greater powers with less legal oversight on national security grounds.
Second, a cynic might argue that Apple put up a noisy, principled fight that one time precisely to create the perception that you have here. It could be the FBI learned data requests to Apple are a dead end!
Or the two came to a mutually beneficial understanding: "don't come in the front door waving a court order for the cameras and we'll see what we can do when our reputation isn't on the line, see? And maybe if we help out, that antitrust investigation isn't necessary after all!"
lotsofpulp 23 days ago [-]
FISA courts and patriot act came way before iPhone, how is Apple going to fight a law that is already on the books?
A proposed law, or bill, like the one in the OP’s article, can be fought against.
jki275 20 days ago [-]
You've never heard of courts? The world does not work the way you think it does at all.
jajko 23 days ago [-]
I can't imagine all cloud providers weren't leaned on heavily to provide this access long time ago. Its a treasure trove too juicy to be ignored. Pro quid pro of course.
Anything else is highly illogical or outright stupid, imagine CIA or NSA having meeting on this decade and a half ago and deciding 'well if they won't give us full access when we asked nicely I guess that's it, we have to respect the law and their wish'. LOL. They don't respect basic human rights at all if you don't hold US passport, and even then the list of cases breaking laws and constitution is endless.
Apple is good with their PR, but why do folks accept their every word literally and not as part of marketing spin to sell more services is beyond me. Rest of the market is not even trying to spin it that way which is actually more respectable behavior.
You're including end-to-end encrypted content in that as well, like from Advanced Data Protection?
> If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data – including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more – is protected using end-to-end encryption. No one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple, and this data remains secure even in the case of a data breach in the cloud.
I have no opinion on whether US intel has a backdoor into this e2e encryption or not. It seems like the sort of thing where people non-chalantly state that it must happen, but of course no one ever has actual proof or a source.
monooso 23 days ago [-]
We're specifically talking about files encrypted E2E using ADP. Can you point to any such files being used in prosecutions?
yreg 23 days ago [-]
> It’s been publicly used in a bunch of prosecutions at this point
Can you give an example then? It would be major hacker news news if supposedly E2EE iCloud data were used in a prosecution.
jachee 23 days ago [-]
Got any sources to back that up?
talldayo 23 days ago [-]
I mean, you're right. People think "end to end" encryption helps them, but they forget that Apple controls both the server and client more than the user does.
scarface_74 23 days ago [-]
Don’t you think out of the thousands of Apple employees that someone would leak it?
autoexec 23 days ago [-]
No. Whistleblowers are extremely rare. Snowden did it, but he also worked with thousands of other employees who had knowledge of some, if not all, of the abuses Snowden told us about, but not one of them came forward. This is pretty much always the case when it comes to whistleblowers. For every one who came forward there were many many more who knew and stayed silent and it's hard to blame them. Whistleblowers are harshly punished, and sometimes killed in retaliation.
Being willing to sacrifice everything you have, including your career, your freedom, and potentially your life, just to let the public know the truth is not something you should expect people to do. It's a huge amount of risk and sacrifice while the only reward is knowing that you've done the right thing even though you'll be vilified and punished for it. That's what makes whistleblowers heroes.
dylan604 23 days ago [-]
Not necessarily. There's a lot of people absolutely unwilling to risk loosing their salary and career. If you are doxxed as the leaker, what other company would hire you? I'm not even considering if there could be criminal charges involved as well.
Snowden left an example of what kind of lifestyle is possible after leaking, and I doubt snowflakes at FAANG would be down for that. Or how about other examples of leakers that have turned up dead? That's a cheery thought to consider.
So yeah, at this point in time, I do believe there's a lot of people that might not agree, but are not up for the task.
lern_too_spel 23 days ago [-]
Snowden chose that lifestyle. If he had stayed in the US, he would be out of prison already, just without a security clearance. The longest sentence anyone ever got for leaking government information to the media is 63 months, with a release after 50 months on good behavior.
dbtc 23 days ago [-]
It's all speculation, but perhaps he was also thinking about how high his risk of 'suicide' would be.
jajko 23 days ago [-]
Manning was released early from her 35 years prison sentence only because there was Obama who had balls to do it and go against extreme far right part of society and government employees. Not going to happen again anytime soon in US.
I am actually surprised she survived this and wasnt suicided or sent to Guantanamo for water boarding till heart stops, I guess thats only for those without US passports.
lern_too_spel 22 days ago [-]
Manning did not leak to media, who would vet the data before releasing it. She effectively directly dumped diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks.
lern_too_spel 23 days ago [-]
Apple is famous for keeping projects secret from its own employees. To be clear, I think it's unlikely that this has already been set up for the US, but it would be easiest to do at Apple.
23 days ago [-]
spiderfarmer 23 days ago [-]
We know.
hk1337 23 days ago [-]
By collude, you mean responding to subpoenas they are legally obliged to respond to?
thinkingtoilet 23 days ago [-]
Of course that's a thing. However, anyone who's ever read a history book has a pretty good reason to be suspicious it ends there.
Collude is such a fucking weird word to describe an alliance.
abtinf 23 days ago [-]
Collude seems like a pretty good word for an alliance formed for the purpose of subverting the law.
mathieuh 23 days ago [-]
Yes “collude” contains exactly the right connotations. Slimy, sneaky, against the interests of the public.
mrighele 23 days ago [-]
That's not even the main issue in my opinion: how can Apple do this without breaking laws in other countries ?
I am not a lawyer, but I think that this would be illegal under EU privacy law.
tokioyoyo 23 days ago [-]
The same way it operates in China? I guess, China is much bigger market, so it’s worth the effort. Not sure how it’ll go in the UK.
mrighele 23 days ago [-]
> a back door that allows UK security officials unencumbered access to encrypted user data worldwide
As far as I can tell, China is asking to keep Chinese data in China and have access to it, but it is not asking to access data of American or European citizen and if it did we would be pissed off.
Chance-Device 22 days ago [-]
I think it’s a cultural issue. The British have an inflated sense of national self worth as a result of being the world’s largest power during the British empire. While this has not been the case for some time now (since Suez in 1948? Longer?) the people still carry the memory and national myth of great importance. This is likely what drives a sense of entitlement that British demands should bypass the laws of every other country in the world and give them unfettered access to everyone’s data. Think about that, literally everyone who has an Apple device!
Frankly, the arrogance is appalling.
xyst 23 days ago [-]
MI6 probably gutted the cybersec division. Probably don’t have many viable sploits in their cache against Apple.
I suppose this is _good_ but more competent and well funded groups out of Israel, Israeli military complex, Cyprus don’t need to “ask” for a back door.
philipwhiuk 23 days ago [-]
Cyber-related stuff is GCHQ (black/greyhat) or NCSC (whitehat)
guappa 23 days ago [-]
Probably a manouver to make them look good but also privately complying anyway.
simion314 23 days ago [-]
>How could this even be enforced if Apple pulls out cloud services of the UK ?
Honest question, how Apple is doing it in China? Maybe the exact same scheme will work for UK.
latexr 23 days ago [-]
> When asked by The Post whether any government had requested a backdoor, Google spokesman Ed Fernandez did not provide a direct answer but suggested none exist: "Google cannot access Android end-to-end encrypted backup data, even with a legal order," he stated.
No, that does not suggest none exists, it only says they don’t have access to it. They could have chosen or have been ordered to give the keys to the government agency but not keep one themselves. I’m not saying that’s likely, just that it’s important to not take these statements as saying more than they do. They wouldn’t hesitate to use “technically correct” as a defence and you have to take that into account.
em500 23 days ago [-]
Before people immediately think the worst of Google or other corporate representatives, be aware that people working in these companies need to weight their words carefully. From The Verge's article on the issue:
The UK has reportedly served Apple a document called a technical capability notice. It’s a criminal offense to even reveal that the government has made a demand. Similarly, if Apple did cede to the UK’s demands then it apparently would not be allowed to warn users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure.
latexr 23 days ago [-]
Which is exactly why I’m making this point. If no government had requested a backdoor, they could’ve simply answered “no”. When you have to weight your words, it means you’re not at liberty to say whatever you want. That is itself a signal, and why warrant canaries are a thing.
Simply answering "no" when that's the truth could be illegal too. The ability to say no creates the ability to say yes as well. If I ask Apple whether they got an order and they say "no", then a year later they say "we cannot confirm nor deny", well then that's a yes.
Kinda depends on judicial interpretations of free speech, but that's how warrant canaries work. Are warrant canaries legal in the UK? They seem to be in the US but idk how well established that is.
lysace 23 days ago [-]
That concept has always sounded like tech people trying to hack the law without the proper real-world legal knowledge, IMO.
Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post that "[p]ersonally, I have never believed [warrant canaries] would work. It relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking doesn't prevent someone from not speaking. But courts generally aren't impressed by this sort of thing, and I can easily imagine a secret warrant that includes a prohibition against triggering the warrant canary.
You're right to point out how carefully worded these statements are. But I suspect it's rare for companies of Google's status to not have been asked for a backdoor. It's not really an informative question to ask Google.
latexr 23 days ago [-]
Of course they were asked. That doesn’t matter, my point is the author is assuming more from the reply than what was said.
It’s like if you conspired with your brother to steal from the cookie jar. He stole the cookies while you distracted your parents. Later on your mother reports to your father:
> When asked whether they stole from the cookie jar, derbOac did not provide a direct answer but suggested they didn’t didn’t know who did it: "I did not see anyone removing cookies from the jar," they stated.
Your statement is factually correct, but it doesn’t say what your mother concluded.
Take8435 23 days ago [-]
Can you elaborate on why you say it is not informative?
derbOac 23 days ago [-]
My guess is Google, Microsoft, Signal, Apple, Cloudfare, etc etc etc have all been asked if they could make backdoors. I expect they have all been asked. It's not the same as asking if they have made a backdoor.
So I think a journalist asking an organization like Google if they've been asked isn't really informative, because they almost certainly have been.
I'm not sure how it's relevant other than to say an answer from Google's response might seem oblique, but they're also being asked obliquely and that colors how you might interpret their response.
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
Presumably because the answer is "of course yes".
free_bip 23 days ago [-]
How does this work wrt false advertising laws? If I relied upon their end to end encryption and it turns out to be false advertising because there's a secret backdoor, who do I sue?
grayhatter 23 days ago [-]
no one, you'll be in secret prison before you somehow gain standing
chgs 22 days ago [-]
If the back door was used the a three letter agency sure.
If the backdoor was exploited by a criminal though?
grayhatter 21 days ago [-]
so in this hypothetical, some blackhat is able to download data in mass from apple servers? And you're worried that the only thing stopping that, or creating a duty to protect the data is encryption?
atonse 23 days ago [-]
But they can still notify the public, through those canary statements. (I forgot the name commonly used).
For example (a simplistic one), you can have a statement like "we do not have any backdoors in our software" added to your legal documents (TOS, etc). But once a backdoor is added, you are compelled by your lawyers to remove that statement. So you aren't disclosing that you have added a backdoor. You're just updating your legal documents to make accurate claims.
23 days ago [-]
SkyBelow 23 days ago [-]
Such actions, even just the act of deleting text, conveys a message you were ordered to not convey and the government is not likely to take too kindly to that.
ycombinatrix 23 days ago [-]
That is a fraudulent TOS if you're lying to the customer though
tonyarkles 22 days ago [-]
Not exactly the same but I've had a discussion around a similar topic with a Canadian immigration lawyer. We were put in contact by a mutual friend and the lawyer was looking for an email provider that was hosted in Canada and didn't rely on any US-based services (e.g. spam filtering). I asked him about the requirement and he pointed out that it was legally impossible for him to simultaneously comply with the USA PATRIOT Act and Canadian data protection/privacy laws. The US Gov't could compel his email provider to disclose solicitor-client privileged data with a gag order, and by not telling his client he would be breaking Canadian law.
By putting statements like what you're proposing in your TOS or marketing material you are potentially setting yourself up for a situation where it's now impossible to comply with all applicable laws. As others have mentioned, Australia passed legislation preventing you from disclosing the existence or non-existence of specific legal documents; they're at least warning you up front that the canary itself is illegal. The solution is to not make marketing statements that would become fraudulent in a situation where you can't legally retract them, unfortunately.
Edit: since lawyers are mentioned here... if the lawyer who is telling you that you need to remove the line from the TOS is the same lawyer who told you it was ok to put the line in the TOS... you should probably find a new lawyer because they didn't think through the consequences of approving it in the first place.
thewebguyd 23 days ago [-]
> if Apple did cede to the UK’s demands then it apparently would not be allowed to warn users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure.
One would think this runs afoul of other laws though, truth in advertising and similar.
Its such a legal minefield, and the UKs request borders on violating the sovereignty of other nations I can't see Apple complying, but maybe that's hopium talking.
highcountess 23 days ago [-]
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cesarb 23 days ago [-]
> No, that does not suggest none exists, it only says they don’t have access to it. They could have chosen or have been ordered to give the keys to the government agency but not keep one themselves.
The whole definition of "end-to-end encrypted" is that only the two ends have the keys. If anyone or anything other than the two ends (the one sending and the one receiving) has access to the keys, it's not end-to-end encrypted.
bux93 23 days ago [-]
Whatsapp has had end-to-end encryption since 2016. But it only added encryption to cloud backups in 2021. They didn't share any key material with Google, just backed up the messages and media without any encryption to begin with.
kccqzy 23 days ago [-]
Yes exactly. Google is very careful to say that "Google cannot access Android end-to-end encrypted backup data" and notice it doesn't say that all Android backups are end-to-end encrypted. For what we know, Google could have decided to use non-end-to-end backups in the UK and end-to-end backups everywhere else.
chrisjj 22 days ago [-]
I think that's the implication, not the definition. Data remains encrypted even when a third party gets access a key.
23 days ago [-]
JW_00000 23 days ago [-]
But if they could give a key to the government agency, it wouldn't be end-to-end encrypted, right? Or are you thinking they would have a copy of users' keys that they gave out? (Which I guess is technically possible.)
aqme28 23 days ago [-]
They could also cripple user key-generation. E.g. they choose random primes from a known subset. It would make communication crackable while also being difficult to detect.
jonhohle 23 days ago [-]
It would be no different from how multiple devices and users access the same content (chat, shared data, etc.). The government’s keys would always be included in set which encrypts the real key. They don’t need the users’ key, Apple doesn’t need their private keys. So technically still end to end encrypted, just with a hidden party involved. Users have no way of knowing this doesn’t already happen.
And when their key leaks, it’s as good as no encryption, but still end-to-end encrypted.
23 days ago [-]
theshrike79 23 days ago [-]
If the other end is the government, then it's kinda valid? =)
marcosdumay 22 days ago [-]
You can not use a DH key exchange, and create the symmetric key by some procedure that is predictable, or encode the symmetric key with the government's public key and send it to them.
It doesn't stop being end-to-end when you add another end. We often do group chats that way.
Or you can create a side-channel and send al the data there. That would stop it from being end-to-end.
23 days ago [-]
arccy 23 days ago [-]
if google were to transfer the keys elsewhere, they would have (temporary) custody of the keys, granting them access, and invalidating the statement.
jonhohle 23 days ago [-]
My layman’s understanding is that a user’s private key is used to decrypt a random key, which is then used to protect data. Shared files then only require adding key access to that small secret by someone who knows the original key. If one of the original public keys is always one held by authorities, Google never needs to have custody of the private key and can’t access the data themselves making the statement true, but misleading.
latexr 23 days ago [-]
> they would have (temporary) custody of the keys
No, they would have had custody of the keys. Meaning it would still be true they cannot (now) access the data.
negus 23 days ago [-]
Not surprised, considering UK's ridiculous key disclosure law (United Kingdom
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), Part III, activated by ministerial order in October 2007, requires persons to decrypt information and/or supply keys to government representatives to decrypt information without a court order.)
that makes anyone with high-entropy random data (which is undistinguishable from the crypto-container) a criminal for "not providing the keys to decrypt"
Chance-Device 23 days ago [-]
This is the way that the UK has passed laws for a while now, make them so broad that they potentially criminalise everyone, then selectively prosecute. This is a very obvious setup for future totalitarianism. I’m surprised that the British public stands for it, but I guess they must not care.
filcuk 23 days ago [-]
People here are very passive and used to being pulled around.
It's insane how far people's rights have eroded already. No right to protest, no right for privacy - what's next on the chopping block?
the_other 22 days ago [-]
The impression I have is that (some) people in the UK protest but are ignored, vilified, or punished for it. And then nothing changes.
The last time I wrote to my MP, I got a form letter back basically saying "Don't bother contacting us, only The Party matters". (I mean, those weren't the words at all; but having had lame-but-bespoke messages back from them in the past, this was a noticeable and disheartening change).
varispeed 23 days ago [-]
No right to own money. That will be taken away when cash is phased out.
curtisblaine 23 days ago [-]
No right to be mean on social media, too.
nxm 23 days ago [-]
Who defines what is mean? Oh yes, some unelected bureaucrat
chgs 22 days ago [-]
Typically this is judges.
I’m not sure how accountability for the justice service would increase by adding more politics into the mix.
yesco 23 days ago [-]
Future totalitarianism? Is the UK's government restricted in anyway right now? What line have they not crossed yet?
Chance-Device 23 days ago [-]
As far as I know they haven’t started murdering political opponents yet, so that’s something. But I take your point, the UK is today not a serious country for a variety of reasons.
ninalanyon 23 days ago [-]
Are there really any political opponents any more? Al the parties that matter are either explicitly in favour of these ideas or at least behave as though they are.
chgs 22 days ago [-]
Given Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage are in the same elected chamber, I’d be interested in what you think you mean by “political opponent”
ninalanyon 22 days ago [-]
Whatever the person I was replying to means by political opponent. My point was that they are not opponents if they want the same thing or acquiesce to the same thing.
varispeed 23 days ago [-]
This is fuelled by notion that law enforcement is incompetent and doesn't work.
If law enforcement won't catch criminal even if you had them all the details, evidence, witnesses, then average person thinks there laws are dead anyway as there is no one competent to enforce them.
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
> I’m surprised that the British public stands for it, but I guess they must not care.
I can educate people but it always comes back to "I've not got anything to hide". What are we suppose to do, go out to the streets and protest? Start a petition, right to a PM who has no idea what encryption is?
Mentioning Linux to my family opens a can of worms. We are naive to think protesting actually changes something, it's old fashion. Those with power just don't care so unless people attack with their wallets nothing will come from.
It's not 1995 so unless you have £ for lobbying surrounded by people in suites there is nothing public of any nation can do against anyone in power.
63 23 days ago [-]
They have this power precisely because you have given up. Government power is derived from the consent of the goverened. Collective action does work and always will, but it needs to be coordinated. If enough people in the UK stopped going to work, they could affect change pretty quickly I reckon.
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
> They have this power precisely because you have given up.
I've not given up, I just don't follow outdated methods of means to take back power. I use my wallet, I don't shop at amazon.
Stop being a consumer and supporting a ego who supports the wars, causes your protesting against. That would be the next greatest thing but we are too convenienced by these services.
Contradiction much? One where we would rather go and protest, head home and then go and support companies that do the opposite of what your fighting for. That is why protests are flawed. I'd rather be out on a Saturday picking up litter (like I do) than be at a protest and that's not just because I don't support the cause.
I just see the it as a old-fashioned method that doesn't apply to today’s new powers. You can't fight for power and then oppositely go and do the opposite nor can you fight when the power is to corrupt. Level the playing field is all you can do.
Innovate, create and throw it back in their faces and don't sell out when the FANG bites you with your cheque.
> Collective action does work and always will, but it needs to be coordinated.
Of course, but who wants to coordinate it. Why not yourself, adding to who wants to be put on a hit list? I get executed and then what, It all goes back to how it was. The Boeing whistleblowers ended up dead, any recourse from that?
Chance-Device 23 days ago [-]
Don’t you think maybe this attitude is part of the problem?
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
Not at all. We should be banding together to make the next best thing but people are lazy, but who can blame them? Easier to just press the big red NetFlix button and then order food on GrubEats.
I'm being realistic, in the capitalist world we live in unless you have assets, power your worth nothing.
You have no voice, no power, ever. Where's the futuristic project that saves the world? I'm sure the next JavaScript library posted on the front page of HN will be it.
I hate to be "woke" and break it to you that in this reality that your just a schmuck to an entity who's paying you to ensure that your powering their machine with bare benefits; if your lucky. Many homeless folk out there.
Heck, if you've got a job after this ML/AI fluff, you must be good at it. I'm 35 and above cynical at this point, I see no hope in this world from both people and those who run the show.
Take it as you wish, I wouldn't hold it against mother earth imploding herself because of the vile the homo sapiens race has become. Anyway, back to our designated cubicles within the walled gardens we opted for.
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
> I'm being realistic, in the capitalist world we live in unless you have assets your worth nothing. You have no voice, no power, ever.
Describe a better (on average) world and let's try it.
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
Less convenience, more care. More respect, less extreme actions. Effective penalities issued to those who break the rules.
A fine to a $multinational company isn't punishment. Strip their assets from.
More respect for one another would uphold so much more positivity in this world, but no we must judge and align folk in to groups. We are still divided by diversity. It's 2025 and we still have issues over someone being black, white or in-between.
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
I don't know how any of that would translate into a replacement for capitalism, except for capitalism with less plastic?
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
Capitalism isn't inherently bad. It works well with respect.
But in this day and age capitalism has gotten so rootless that nothing is done when the power in question abuses their power. There is no respect in today’s capitalism, upgrade respect and you'll have upgraded capitalism. we only go to war because of lack of respect.
Turn the page of the plastic age. I'm now rate limited so that's my digital protesting done for today. Not that anyone has taken side and protested with but would rather point how my ideology is wrong and not contributing to what they would do. But I'm sure you'll be buying your pickets off amazon and walking around town with them only to be tossed aside after the rally this Saturday for them to do something comfy either whether it being Netflix, gaming or porn.
But that's okay it's why I do litter picking out of civil respect; not enough. That way I can pick up the crap that people think they are fighting for as my power of fighting back. When you do go for a smoke, throw the butt on the street, spit on the pavement I'll be there scrubbing that too. Where's the respect? But, hey. People suck we know this. Companies suck more.
Can you threaten class-action lawsuits? If so: Donald, Elon, Jeff, America, UK, Israel, Russia, Microsoft, Google, Apple; you name it. If $entity has treated the world with hurt, you have no respect. Is that what you want to hear? Because that's true capitalism.
Sugar coated? Close your eyes and turn on the TV; especially the news. Pick a side and enjoy the slaughter. You'll be dead soon.
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
Sorry, I'm genuinely confused about what you're saying. If you think no one is worried about plastic except you I honestly don't know how you could possibly get that impression.
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
You keep bringing up plastic yet I've not mentioned. Maybe read my first post you replied to again and understand the world is fucked because of faults.
Turn the page of the plastic age? We all live in a plastic age. Everything is plastic your phone is too. Wars are plastic. Plastic is OLD. Turn the page.
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
You agree. You did mention plastic.
doublerabbit 23 days ago [-]
I do agree. I had edited my original topic post as I didn't like how I had phased my sentence.
For sentence coherency; I do that.
Is this a problem?
trallnag 23 days ago [-]
I'm not surprised at all
tim333 23 days ago [-]
Brit here. Yeah from my experience people don't care. Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad.
Most day to day complaints are they don't prosecute enough, often related to the bastard that snatched your phone. We have approximately zero people sitting in jail for failing to decrypt and similar.
>This is a very obvious setup for future totalitarianism.
No it really isn't. If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writing books like 1984 and bombing nazis.
kypro 23 days ago [-]
Brit here.
> Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad.
Perhaps often they've done something bad, but sometimes they haven't, that's the point. Obviously this is wrong and you shouldn't be so passive about it.
> If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writing books like 1984 and bombing nazis.
I'd argue people in the UK today like to adopt the label of being anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarian, but in reality most people here, including our politicians, quite like authoritarianism.
For example, people here often argue things like "I support free speech, but obviously insulting someone for their identity is wrong". So in the UK we apparently have free speech and I can apparently criticise religious people, but at the same time just this week someone in the UK was arrested for burning a bible.
You see this hypocrisy constantly in the UK... "I'm not an authoritarian, but smoking is bad". "I'm not an authoritarian, but you can't be saying that". "I'm not an authoritarian, but if you're worried about mass surveillance you probably have something to hide". "I"m not authoritarian, but you can't just let people have private data on an encrypted device which the government can't access".
The UK is very authoritarian these days, but unlike other parts of the world people here deny it while arguing in favour of more of it.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with being authoritarian and wanting the government to have more control either. Clearly many countries find this type of government appealing, but lets at least be honest about it. We don't want kids on social media. We don't want people smoking. We don't want people being about to call people names on Twitter. We don't want people burning religious texts. We don't want people being free from government surveillance.
caseyy 22 days ago [-]
It is true, the British do tend to submit to authority. Questioning authority is considered poor taste, bad manners.
This way is more serene and orderly than anarchy. But I suppose it bodes poorly for the individual liberties. On balance, there is value in aligning and orchestrating society. Too much individualism can turn into radicalisation through identity politics, as we’ve seen in the US in the last decade.
A large degree of societal cohesion is not all bad, in the context of the alternative. It’s not all good either, but it has served the British thus far. It’s serving some other countries like China, too, one can’t deny it.
Chance-Device 22 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, I suspect this is true. The British public does have an authoritarian bent, with a side helping of “rules are for other people, this couldn’t possibly impact me at some point”.
Chance-Device 23 days ago [-]
Today, maybe, even so it probably depends on who you ask.
The thing about giving your rights away is that it’s very difficult to get them back, and you never know who “they” are going to be in the future.
tim333 23 days ago [-]
I'm not sure "giving your rights away" quite sums up the process. It's more as a Brit, and probably most of us, weren't even aware this bill was happening - the government passes many pages of dull legislation - but if it proves a pain you can always vote for whoever offers to repeal it. I suspect the encryption law vs Apple is going to result in the government backing down to some extent.
Plenty of people have been jailed in the uk for not providing pins or passwords.
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
I've tried to explain the issues with the UK government's stance on digital privacy to my friends. The responses I get:
* I have nothing to hide, I don't care
* Oh come on, our government doesn't care what I'm up to
* The UK will never be totalitarian. I'm not scared of the government
* The UK civil service is incompetent and could never pull this off (fair point, although I worry about the safety of my personal data in the hands of such people)
Let's not forget we had a hard-left (Corbyn) socialist regime come close to power, whose cabinet members called for "direct action" against political opponents, just a few years ago.
I don't think people realise how quickly things could go wrong with these surveillance mechanisms in place, and spiteful, authoritarian politicians taking power.
zfg 22 days ago [-]
> and spiteful, authoritarian politicians taking power.
Or spiteful, authoritarian non-politicians taking power, spreading misinformation, and censoring free speech:
His job is to reduce the size and power of government.
Authoritarians don’t do that. Libertarians do that. Two opposite ends of the spectrum.
“Misinformation” is a very subjective word, so I’m afraid you and I will have to agree to disagree that Musk is spreading misinformation.
Don’t believe everything you read about Musk in the mainstream media. Don’t forget that the media have a vested interest in denigrating Musk, because he’s their most significant competitor, and while X exists, and we’re able to hear directly from influential people, the legacy media is powerless to control the narrative.
zfg 22 days ago [-]
> Musk is a libertarian not an authoritarian.
What, your claim is that libertarians suppress speech? Explain why Musk is censoring speech on Twitter.
Musk is authoritarian by nature. He always has been.
> “Misinformation” is a very subjective word
It isn't. It's lies, falsehoods, and untruths. Here are some of the lies Musk has spread:
And so on and so on. He never stops lying. He can't help himself. There's something wrong with him.
> Don’t forget that the media have a vested interest in denigrating Musk, because he’s their most significant competitor, and while X exists, and we’re able to hear directly from influential people, the legacy media is powerless to control the narrative.
This kind of conspiratorial thinking won't get you anywhere.
Carl Sagan worried this would happen to you (https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...). Sagan said, "I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness"
And, sure enough, it has.
cbeach 22 days ago [-]
Quoting opinion pieces in rags like the Washington Post (owned by Musk's bitter personal rival Jeff Bezos) is not the way for us to come to a consensus on what is true (or not) about Musk.
zfg 22 days ago [-]
That doesn't explain why Musk is suppressing speech on X. Why is Musk suppressing free speech on X?
Many outlets have reported on Musk's LA fires lies. Pick the one you like. Here are some:
Alex Jones loved getting the endorsement from Musk.
cbeach 22 days ago [-]
We've been here before.
In 2023 there were terrible wildfires in Greece. The media immediately jumped on it and claimed climate change was responsible. Anyone who questioned the narrative was a "climate change denier" or "conspiracy theorist"
Then, later on, we discovered there had been 79 arrests for arson. Obviously, the media barely covered this. Only on free speech platforms like X was the truth revealed, and now, it is also documented on Wikipedia:
Today's "conspiracy theory" often turns out to be tomorrow's fact - so don't be so quick to judge Musk. He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do, given he runs a large network of hundreds of millions of users.
He's got over a decade's worth of lies behind him now. When someone is of such weak character that they feel the need to lie about being good at video games then there's not much more to say.
> He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do
He doesn't. He endorses conspiracy theories.
Carl Sagan was right. You're no longer able to distinguish between what feels good and what's true.
computerthings 22 days ago [-]
Claiming "disinformation is subjective" and then cherry picking something to avoid all of it isn't even a credible attempt. Consensus isn't the objective, forwarding arguments that hold water is. You haven't disputed a mentioned single fact, so I take it you know they're indeed facts.
oigursh 22 days ago [-]
Chilling.
varispeed 23 days ago [-]
It seems like perfect case to make multi-container encryption as default. That is different data will be revealed using different key and there is no way of knowing how many containers there are in the blob of data and not possible to prove someone is hiding a key.
wuschel 22 days ago [-]
Not if the state can access your super secret containers while you access them with your software. Because state backdoor either in hardware or in OS level
globular-toast 22 days ago [-]
You could try but you might find it/you get "disappeared" like Truecrypt.
ChrisKnott 22 days ago [-]
It's incumbent on the prosecution to prove that you know the key they are claiming you are withholding. It is a defence to say you forgot it, or that the data is random. The prosecution would have to prove that you didn't forget it and that the data is not random.
s3 makes it clear that if you plausibly claim you have forgotten it, then the prosecution must prove this is not the case (i.e. you still know it) beyond reasonable doubt.
cpymchn 23 days ago [-]
What's new here?
As mentioned in the article, Salt Typhoon and the recency of this request by the UK. At this point they should know better.
My pet theory is anytime the US wants to do something illegal under US law, they simply ask the UK to do it and vice versa. That's why Salt Typhoon isn't and never will be a lesson learned.
cpymchn 23 days ago [-]
I recommend Susan Landau as the goto person on this. She recently spoke with Lawfare on the current state of play.
It's not a pet theory, it's exactly how the Five-Eyes system is meant to work. I remember when Total Information Awareness was announced and they even had a cool badge designed for the new govt department. It wasn't a popular idea.
It is a pet theory. It is illegal for the US to access its citizens' and residents' data without a warrant, and asking somebody else to do it doesn't magically make it legal.
ok_dad 23 days ago [-]
It’s illegal but they do it anyways. Recall there was a man named Snowden who revealed the NSA does collect USA citizens’ data.
isaacremuant 23 days ago [-]
It's not a pet theory when there's proof they have engaged in it through five eyes. We're not saying it respects the constitution or its intent. We're saying it's what happens.
Black CIA sites weren't legal either, nor was torture.
lern_too_spel 22 days ago [-]
> It's not a pet theory when there's proof they have engaged in it through five eyes
What proof? You would think after all the leaks there have been, some proof would exist. Instead, you cling to a conspiracy theory based on a misunderstanding of an agreement.
isaacremuant 21 days ago [-]
The fact that you immediately went for "conspiracy theory" discredits you more than you think it discredits me.
They're all conspiracy theorists when the government is accused of wrongdoing and the "proof" demands and moving goalposts happen all the time. Helped by the lack of transparency and all encompassing powers of agencies and governments.
Your arguments boil down to repeating narratives and things like "X is illegal so it doesn't happen" which just shows how naivety is part of your bad argument repertoire. I'm sure black CIA sites and coup d'etats didn't happen if I can't prove them to your liking... And if I somehow satisfied you, there's some justification that make them lawful and correct.
Give me a break.
lern_too_spel 21 days ago [-]
The fact that you fixated on "conspiracy theory" means you don't know what the term means. It means that a large group of people must be working together to make something happen, yet none of them have said anything.
If the Five Eyes participants worked as you have stated instead of as the leaked agreement documents say they work, you would expect Snowden to leak that first because it is obviously illegal. He did not. Why not reduce the number of people required to keep quiet in the conspiracy by having the US spy directly on its citizens? Every question you might ask about your conspiracy theory makes it sound even more ridiculous if you bother to ask it.
0xedd 20 days ago [-]
[dead]
cess11 23 days ago [-]
Why would they "access [their] data", instead of a report from a foreign intelligence agency?
eptcyka 23 days ago [-]
It is actually Australia where the US goes to test out far-out legislative ideas before implementing them at home.
y-curious 23 days ago [-]
Australia does a great job of enacting wacky authoritarian policies in the last 5 years; It would make sense to use them as a staging ground. Does any specific legislation come to mind?
fukawi2 23 days ago [-]
Social media ban for under 16s is the latest half witted idea enacted by the government here.
throwawaythekey 22 days ago [-]
This week we've had the federal laws strengthend to a one year minimum jail time for nazi salutes. I think saying "punch a nazi" unironically could now also get you a year in jail, but I'm not sure about that one.
Juliate 21 days ago [-]
Oh, you feel the need to defend nazis?
throwawaythekey 21 days ago [-]
No, the neo-nazis can defend themselves. I just support personal freedoms.
Juliate 20 days ago [-]
You’re deflecting.
As such you demonstrate that you will not be an ally in case of a surge of unethical behavior.
The point isn’t for nazis to defend themselves - it is to defeat them while you can.
throwawaythekey 19 days ago [-]
I'm not deflecting I think we just have different points of view.
> The point ... is to defeat them while you can.
That can be your point, and with that framing almost anything is permissible!
My point is generally to let free, open democracy run its course without putting our fingers on the scale too much.
I'm not scared of people doing a salute in the style of a movement that's been dead for almost a century. I'm not scared of communists flags or chants, or people chanting from the river to the sea. I think it's all healthy as long as it's non violent. The argument that it leads to violence is not logically sound and very minority reportesque.
Juliate 19 days ago [-]
> The argument that it leads to violence is not logically sound and very minority reportesque.
That a nazi salute, corroborated with converging political views…? You obviously don’t understand, don’t see how things happen.
Or you do, and you know downplaying “nazi wannabees” is part of the game.
It’s not about being scared but principled: an open democracy does not tolerate ideas going against its very foundations: it makes sure these are, expressed maybe, but kept in a very strict perimeter which they ought no get out from.
throwawaythekey 19 days ago [-]
We don't ban Maoists or Stalinists or Mussolini style facists. We don't ban Napoleonics or Confederates.
After WW2 there was a period of strong Jewish support for nazi rights. Were they not an open democracy? Is the risk in 2025 stronger than what they faced?
I don't know really, is it that every era needs a boogeyman or is it just that we are on a grand cycle away from liberality? Both maybe?
Juliate 18 days ago [-]
We don't? Maybe you don't. From where I am (France), maoists, stalinists, mussolinists, napoleonics or confederates are pretty badly considered, maybe only considered weird and silly as long as they are just spouting vague theory stuff or giving some substance to the conversation.
But as soon as they associate their "thing" to a violent/segregationist personality/behaviour, you can be certain that they are banned, and in no gentle manners.
Wow, I don't know either. Saying nazis could be sort of boogeyman or victims?... that tolerating nazis would be liberal? Wow. Sounds like a line from "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies".
You seem not to understand how a society works or what liberal even means... A liberal cannot tolerate ideas that are explicitly against tolerance, as those lead to illiberal behaviours. The best illustration of it is the actual suppression of speech that is happening in the USA, by the very people that reclaimed freedom of speech.
Or again, you do know.
Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent, asking the ones reacting to that violence to accept it as it is. Not too good looking.
throwawaythekey 17 days ago [-]
> Sounds like a line from "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies".
Thanks I'll check it out.
> Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent
I think I understand where you're coming from but I would instead state it as supporting first amendment style laws for my country, warts and all.
Would you argue that the first amendment should be annulled?
Juliate 17 days ago [-]
No, I’d argue that you do not understand the implications of your first amendment:
because you have an absolute free speech, you also expose yourself to the absolute consequences of what you say, or do.
Exposing oneself as a nazi exposes one to consequences.
Once, not that long ago, your country was proud of kicking nazis dead, for good reasons (albeit a bit hypocritical too when one reads history).
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Banning Social Media for under 16s is a great idea. Hopefully other countries follow soon.
I started reading and it talks about something where a warrant and a case are required to request interception on each case. Is that whacky? You don't think it helps you know fight crime and stuff? Or you have an actual specific example?
thewebguyd 23 days ago [-]
It's exactly how the five-eyes information sharing works.
Participants spy on each other's citizens on the other's behalf and share data, to avoid the legality of doing so to their own citizens.
sitkack 22 days ago [-]
That is exactly what this is.
botanical76 23 days ago [-]
This is so disheartening. I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise. As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this?
edit: typo
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
In my mind, the only way to beat these efforts for good is to win hearts and minds of the larger public. Currently because only weirdos like us care about this stuff, we have to constantly be on top of these things and writing letters making posts etc.
Overall i agree with you, it is really disheartening. That being said, i've made progress with my family on valuing privacy and the dangers of surveillance. I think people might be changing their minds slowly but still lots of work to do.
A breakthrough with my sisters was when abortion was threatened here in the states. Mentioned to them that it would be easy for authorities to enforce abortion punishments by subpoenaing data from menstruation cycle tracker apps. This kind of "clicked" for them and they became more open to the other parts (not given ratukan or whatever their purchase history, etc. etc.)
scarface_74 23 days ago [-]
Thought experiment: let’s say that Trump said that he thinks Apple is helping hide illegal immigrants because they are communicating with each other over channels that ICE can’t decrypt, how much pressure do you think he could put on legislatures to pass a law here?
Now let’s say that some Republican Senators and Representatives were ethically opposed to but then threatened to be primaried and President Musk said he would throw all of his money behind a potential opponent, how long do you think it would take a law to be passed?
Even without a law, we already see that Cook will willingly bend a knee to Trump as will Google.
Right now in my home state the governor was trying to get a law passed banning Western Union from allowing illegal immigrants from sending money overseas.
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
> legislatures
He will just do an executive order. He is an authoritarian, basically a king. "But but but it's illegal". The system can't keep up with speed he is dismantling it.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
I'm not sure what the hypothesis is in your experiment, i agree that all that stuff is really bad
scarface_74 23 days ago [-]
That all it takes is the co-presidents to say that by giving up your freedom we can get rid of those “evil illegal immigrants” and enough people will give up their rights.
marcosdumay 22 days ago [-]
Well, your example doesn't even mention common people.
And the only implication that they exist is about them seeing publicity campaigns of senators.
brandon272 23 days ago [-]
> I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise.
I think we are perhaps the lowest point ever in terms of anti-surveillance efforts. There seems to be bipartisan effort among many (most?) western governments that the government should have unfettered access to all data, regardless of any reasonable expectation of privacy.
Encryption seems barely tolerated these days. Governments are insisting on backdoors, they are making it illegal in some cases for companies to even discuss what is going on or that monitoring is happening.
We barely know what is going on with the programs and efforts that get leaked to the media, much less the programs that operate in total secret.
maeil 23 days ago [-]
> As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this?
If you voted for this Tory-lite government, then you can stop voting for any future Tory-lite governments. If you did not, there's not much you can do in practice without devoting your life to it.
briandear 23 days ago [-]
Wait. The Tories aren’t in power yet you want to attribute this to “Tory-lite?” It’s the Labour Party that is in charge, so why not put the blame on the actual perpetrators? Is it because you don’t want Labour getting blamed? I am confused. The Labour Party is the one jailing people for speech, so it follows that they would want backdoors into iCloud so they can better investigate ThoughtCrime.
The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson (appointed by the Labour Attorney General), warned against "publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So, if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense [incitement to racial hatred]."
He added further, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."
Parent seems to be attempting to discredit, not protect, Labour by calling them "Tory-lite".
maeil 23 days ago [-]
I'm very surprised that I got as many as three replies by people who interpred my comment this way! You got it right indeed.
I'm a bit confused though, surely if I call someone "Hitler-lite" this couldn't possibly be inteprered as something positive, haha. Maybe it's just tribalist reflexes, or maybe I did word things strangely.
tim333 23 days ago [-]
This stuff started from the Online Safety Act 2023 passed under Rishi Sunak's Tory government.
For some reason Americans, including Musk, go all partisan and feel the need to blame speech restriction on the lefty party but it's not what happened.
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
No, it started with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), passed under Tony Blair's Labour government.
I'll skip the same extreme partisan rant, but replacing Musk with Soros or whoever.
23 days ago [-]
Lio 23 days ago [-]
Which party, with a realistic chance of being first past the post, could you vote for that wouldn't bring this in?
This is Hobson's choice as far as I can see.
I don't think there's anyone you could currently vote for that wouldn't do this.
maeil 23 days ago [-]
You know the answer, of course with FPTP there's only two parties with a realistic chance. But why do they? Because you keep voting on them. Your votes made e.g. Corbyn lose but Starmer win. What signal does this give off? A very different signal than if both would've lost. Would another Tory government would have been even worse? In the short term, maybe. But this kind of short-termism is what has got Labour (and all of the other similar parties all over Europe) in this exact predicament. Better to make them lose for picking an awful candidate that's a Tory-lite and bite the bullet. It's not like the Tories would have kept winning for decades on end with the way things were going.
Lio 23 days ago [-]
I’m sorry but Corbyn was a terrible choice as Labour leader, and I vote Labour in that election!
He was unelectable for a variety of reasons.
Here’s three:
Wanting to pull out of NATO and instead appease Putin.
Lying about being forced to sit on the floor of what was later shown to be an empty train.
Basically doing nothing during the Brexit fiasco.
He was just gaff after gaff.
rvz 23 days ago [-]
> If you voted for this Tory-lite government
If you agree that Brexit happened under the Tories and not Labour, then we can also agree that THIS order is happening under the newly elected "Labour Party" and not the "Tories", or so-called "Tory-lite" names.
It's completely pointless trying to remove accountability of this government's illogical actions and then to immediately resort to blaming the previous government for bad decisions like this one.
Just admit that this is under the Labour government.
Huh? You completely misunderstood what I meant by that moniker. In no way at all does it absolve them of blame - quite the opposite, it's calling them nearly as bad, so close that the difference doesn't really matter.
chgs 22 days ago [-]
The government is a reflection of the people. It might not be perfect, but if 80% of the country didn’t want this type of surveillance we wouldn’t see any government pushing it.
You have to change the view of the country as a whole, and for generations the U.K. has been a country of curtain twitchers.
galangalalgol 23 days ago [-]
Coupd protest on weekends and holidays as a hobby, bring a Bluetooth speaker and blast the kinks.
gambiting 23 days ago [-]
Well, in the UK just planning a non-violent protest can get you 5 years in prison as many people have already discovered. Protesting has been pretty much made illegal by a very broad legislation that defines any protest that causes "disruption" as illegal - what "disruption" means is up to interpretation of course.
bluGill 23 days ago [-]
Which just means you need a large group to protest. They can arrest 10,000 people no problem, but get several million together and you have an army. Best is to get some of the actually army/police with you so that when (not if!) they try to get violent you can make it clear this is a revolution they won't win.
I hope it never reaches the above level, but always remember that remains an option.
gambiting 23 days ago [-]
Yeah but to get a million people together you need to plan for it first, and that's where they get you :P It's honestly shocking the state of things in the UK in that regard. I'm surprised there isn't more outrage around it, even the people I know who used to say they hate the Just Stop Oil protesters expressed shock that they've been given 5 years for just talking about a protest, not actually doing it.
foldr 23 days ago [-]
I don't support the legislation you're referring to, but I think you're painting an exaggerated picture (unfortunately a common theme of these threads on HN about the UK). You can easily find examples of recent protests in London: https://news.google.com/search?q=protests%20london&hl=en-GB&...
gambiting 23 days ago [-]
Note how I didn't say that protests don't happen in the UK. They obviously do. But the problem is that now that effectively every protest has been made illegal due to the fluid definition of what "disruptive" means, the enforcement is arbitrary. Just stop oil protesters? Thrown in jail. Protesting in front of the Chinese embassy? Carry on. That's the problem with the broad legislation in the UK - government wants to have the power to spy on everyone, but obviously it doesn't mean everyone will be spied on. Just people who do something the government doesn't like.
foldr 22 days ago [-]
I understand. However, I think your original post was very much open to being misinterpreted by people who don’t live in the UK or follow UK news. It’s obvious to us that protests still happen in the UK. But many people here only read negative news stories about the UK and would just assume from your post that protest in general was now effectively banned.
Weren’t the few JSO protestors who were jailed convicted of doing things that would be objectively illegal in more or less any country? Where are the countries that allow me to deface priceless works of art or block public highways without any legal consequences? I am not saying that these are necessarily illegitimate forms of protest, but they come under the heading of ‘civil disobedience’. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you get punished and thereby draw attention to your cause. Even in the US you can easily be jailed for protests involving blockading or trespassing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69003240.amp, https://www.vpm.org/news/2024-06-24/gaza-protest-interstate-...
It may well be that the new legislation is overly broad, but I don’t think the JSO protests are a great example of this.
wkat4242 23 days ago [-]
But the Tories are not in power. Can't labour just repeal it?
bluehatbrit 23 days ago [-]
Labour have no problem with it, just the same as the Online Safety Act which is causing chaos right now. They're fine with the legislation and have never expressed a desire to see it repealed. They didn't even do much to prevent it in the first place.
This is what the parent comment is getting at when they say "Tory-lite".
robertlagrant 23 days ago [-]
What they're not getting at is that this isn't particularly a Tory thing.
yunruse 23 days ago [-]
"Tory-lite" is a pejorative for Labour, the implication being that they are almost identical in behaviour.
(I very much agree with the sentiment...)
Jigsy 23 days ago [-]
Which party do you think passed the "Tell us your password or go to prison law" to begin with?
(Hint: It certainly isn't Tory.)
It's also one of the reasons why I will never vote Labour as long as I live.
int_19h 22 days ago [-]
Are there any parties in UK that are anti-surveillance and have ever had even one seat?
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Are you still under the impression that different political parties will actually do diffrent things? It even sounds like you think Labor are 'good' and the Tories are 'bad'. I think you may change this opinion after the next 4 years.
isaacremuant 23 days ago [-]
My sweet summer child. It's a false dichotomy, like most of these types of issues, it has actual bipartisan support.
Same thing happens in many other countries no matter how strongly HN users want to tell you A is literally hitler and B is great.
briandear 23 days ago [-]
Labour caused it. Why would they repeal what they want?
InTheArena 23 days ago [-]
Yeah know, at some point a historical review would suggest that the constant stream of labour led initiatives to end privacy might indicate that the problem is not just the tories.
HamsterDan 22 days ago [-]
"Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos"
dead_gunslinger 23 days ago [-]
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csmattryder 23 days ago [-]
> I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy na[rra]tive
What lead to to believe that? The Conservatives and Conservative-Continuity governments both agree that our data simply must be in the hands of the police, DEFRA, and your local council.
RIPA will never be repealed and only strengthened.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
I don't disagree with your analysis but i wouldn't be so fatalistic. This stuff _isn't_ inevitable and i think it's possible to win people over to our side. Things can change for the better, but they won't unless people who care don't give up
csmattryder 23 days ago [-]
Ahh, I used to have that opinion, but I've encountered too many "It's fine if they want it, I've got nothing to hide" people. (They never give you their Facebook password if you ask, though. Funny, that.)
Change what you can, I say, VPN on the network device.
> When Oliver shows Snowden evidence that all typical Americans care about is whether the government can see our "dick pics," he encourages Snowden to go through a list of every government surveillance program and explain its capabilities in terms of access to "dick pics."
Yeah totally see your point, i'm just not ready to give up yet
isaacremuant 23 days ago [-]
Probably helps if the next time they try to remove the rights of large segments of the populace based on medical choices, lock people down, track them and propose vaccine passports, that you realize where everything is headed and oppose it vocally.
It's always through the appearance of good intentions and a public that pushes for whatever narrative they're fed that they normalize this.
People love and want more of this, not less.
buyucu 22 days ago [-]
vote for people who are anti surveillance.
kandesbunzler 22 days ago [-]
so right wing?
buyucu 22 days ago [-]
no idea, UK is not important enough to follow their politics. vote for whoever supports privacy.
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
Let's start supporting parties that have principles.
And stop making excuses for parties that don't (i.e. Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives).
At the moment, the UK public (and media) considers it a sport to disparage and smear parties like Reform, whose leaders want to shrink the power and over-reach of the state.
We are so concerned with appearing virtuous and internationally generous, we cannot be seen to align with a party that wants to put UK citizens first (border security? deporting dangerous criminals back to their home nation? gasp, how could we be so ghastly!)
This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
rvz 23 days ago [-]
> Let's start supporting parties that have principles.
The problem is that there are none.
The correct assessment of all these political parties is that by default, they all cannot be trusted. Especially both labour and the conservatives.
> This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
Yes. The second problem is that the United Kingdom is incapable to changing itself historically and is fundamentally destined to never be open to change.
TacticalCoder 22 days ago [-]
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Kenji 23 days ago [-]
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Havoc 23 days ago [-]
UK tech laws seem to consistently be the worst of both worlds. Not rights centric like the EU and not business supportive like the US.
Just old people making bad laws about stuff they don't understand - or are straight up citizen hostile, sometimes hard to tell which it is.
eagleislandsong 23 days ago [-]
> Not rights centric like the EU
Sadly, the EU is trying very hard and very persistently to pass the Chat Control bill. So far the EU hasn't succeeded, but I would be surprised if EU politicians didn't keep trying until it is finally codified into law.
alkonaut 23 days ago [-]
There's always competing interests, but I like to look at it as a glass half full. It's the focus on rights that has ensured it's still not passed.
throwaway127353 23 days ago [-]
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marcosdumay 22 days ago [-]
The EU has one extremely corrupt legislative body, yes. But they are usually not a problem due to them not having any formal power.
andyjohnson0 23 days ago [-]
Successive UK governments consistently fail to understand the UK's place in the modern world. Insisting on access to encrypted data in all jurisdictions globally is just another example of them thinking small and acting big. Its the digital equivalent of sending a gunboat to put-down the troublesome "natives". Meanwhile its 2025, not 1925.
(disclosure: brit)
77pt77 23 days ago [-]
This was even warranted in 1925, more like 1875.
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
It would be like demanding a lock up in NYC open a locker in your name and seize all contents.
wyclif 22 days ago [-]
I'd like to think that we've reached the point now that there will be mass resistance to threats to privacy and freedom of speech in the UK, but Britons are such a docile, accepting, and pliant people when it comes to standing up to Big Brother.
globular-toast 22 days ago [-]
Why now? I gave up on this at least 10 years ago. If you can't even get techy people to think about the ethical ramifications of encryption etc then it's a lost cause. What makes you think now it's different? They said it couldn't get much worse 10 years ago, as did they 20. Do you really think the UK population has a breaking point where they will suddenly understand privacy and why it's important?
The UK population generally wants to put their fingers in their ears and pretend everything is ok. Remember we're all descended from people who didn't go to the colonies to try to get a better life.
wyclif 18 days ago [-]
Why now? Well FWIW I also don't have much hope it will happen. But maybe the needle will be moved if Apple doesn't back down and it affects UK iPhone users.
HPsquared 23 days ago [-]
It's pretty standard for the UK gov to take a "worst of both worlds" approach.
harvey9 23 days ago [-]
Ignorant rather than old. Alan Turing was born more than 100 years ago.
tim333 23 days ago [-]
I looked them up and they are not terribly old but did Ancient and Modern History at Oxford - the guy who did the law and philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford - Home Secretary. I doubt they are very up on tech.
kandesbunzler 22 days ago [-]
What are you talking about? I'm a german and the surveillance here is crazy. The EU is pushing for more surveillance.
I always love the left wing echo chambers like reddit/HN who pretend like the EU is some kind of utopia.
I was wondering whether this is about Advanced Data Protection, which encrypts almost all data end-to-end on iCloud. It’s only later in this report that it gets into this key detail:
> At issue is cloud storage that only the user, not Apple, can unlock. Apple started rolling out the option, which it calls Advanced Data Protection, in 2022.
Before stating this, the article says:
> Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said.
This means Apple would be prevented from providing Advanced Data Protection to users in the U.K.
Not making Advanced Data Protection available is made worse by this requirement:
> One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security.
Apple can appeal, but is forced to comply meanwhile (until the appeal is heard) anyway:
> Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.
_Algernon_ 23 days ago [-]
If they had some balls, they would just stop offering icloud altogether in the UK until they have appealed. Let's see how the judge feels when half the country can't access their files anymore and Apple points to this decision as the reason.
bArray 23 days ago [-]
Not just most of the judges, but most of the MPs who voted on this. Let them eat their own cake.
I think they could do something like what Tik Tok did, by letting users know why they can no longer provide the service.
I would personally give Apple money to see them actually stand-up to this. What's probably more concerning is the number of companies not complaining about this at all.
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
UK judges are not elected, and don't do things on the basis of what the public thinks.
Judges only interpret the law as laid down by parliament. And, in theory at least, parliament cares about public opinion.
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
Even to the extent that parliament does care — and both this lot and their predecessors have ignored a lot of criticism about this specific law — turning public disfavour into a change to the law is often a slow process.
I don't see UK judges getting motivated to rule in favour of a foreign company because they took their ball and went home, not even in cases where the ball happens to be very popular.
Someone 23 days ago [-]
> when half the country can't access their files anymore and Apple points to this decision as the reason.
Even in that case, Apple could withdraw from the market.
If push comes to shove and apple actually called their bluff and withdrew completely from the UK market, I'd bet that that government would become so unpopular that they would not be elected again for quite some time.
donohoe 23 days ago [-]
Gag orders affect information, not whether they continue to provide a service or not.
Marsymars 23 days ago [-]
I expect everyone would read between the lines if Apple simply offered "no comment".
echelon_musk 23 days ago [-]
> the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.
Seems absurdist. They have to implement the backdoor, appeal, and only if the appeal is successful can they disable it.
_Algernon_ 23 days ago [-]
Apple can't offer icloud with encryption. It doesn't force them to offer the service at all afaict? Forcing a company to offer service at all seems like a gigantic judicial overstep IMO.
eterm 23 days ago [-]
Apple doesn't have the same dominance in the UK than it does in the US, so the UK would probably just tough that one out.
MortyWaves 23 days ago [-]
I have zero clue where you’re getting this from. iPhone is incredibly popular and every politician has one.
wkat4242 23 days ago [-]
True, the UK is one of the few European countries where iOS is bigger than android just like in the US. I work in mobile management and we see those a lot in northern Europe. Where they're scarce is in South and East Europe.
Here in Spain no person has even tried to SMS me (which is the fallback for iMessage which I don't have) for 6 years or so :). I also don't have RCS enabled. It's all WhatsApp and Telegram.
AlchemistCamp 23 days ago [-]
Yes. Due to higher prices, iPhones are more popular in richer countries.
wkat4242 23 days ago [-]
Yeah indeed.
The SE is also relatively expensive in Europe. And in Spain Apple seems to have completely removed all trace of the SE from their website. Strange enough. Didn't check other EU sites.
em500 23 days ago [-]
They don't sell the SE in the EU anymore since this year, because it's not compliant with the new regulations that mandate USB-C charging.
alwillis 22 days ago [-]
The new iPhone SE will likely ship later this month with USB-C support.
izacus 23 days ago [-]
It's very likely that iCloud is outright disabled via MDM on those politician iPhones anyway, so they probably wouldn't even notice.
michaelt 23 days ago [-]
In the UK the employment arrangements of politicians are very unconventional. In some ways, they're more like independent contractors than salaried employees.
If your MP has an office in their constituency? They rent the office and buy all the computers and desks and printers and whatnot out of their own pocket, and get the expenses reimbursed later on.
The separation between work life and professional life is also extremely blurry. After all, you have to build up a network of supporters and donors and people in the party who like you before you can get elected. So hundreds of your best supporters and closest allies already have your personal number saved against your name in their phone.
I think they do not have MDM.
pjc50 23 days ago [-]
The phones tend to be personal phones. We found that out when there was a big investigation trying to retrieve Whatsapp messages.
CSSer 23 days ago [-]
Then it sounds like they don’t have much to lose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
chrisjj 22 days ago [-]
> Apple points to this decision as the reason.
Unlikely. That's illegal.
23 days ago [-]
coretx 23 days ago [-]
Roll out the change in the city of London first and watch the finance sector crash :D
The rest of the UK probably won't have to follow suit.
necovek 22 days ago [-]
Democracies around the world are increasingly looking to surveil and expose private data of their citizens, and introducing laws where simple act of defiance will become criminal.
I believe we should increasingly turn to steganography as a way to ensure our privacy (obviously, combined with encryption). Something that provides simple plausible deniability but lots of data to use as a carrying medium should become the default selection (like "personal videos" — a great use for our phone cameras to build an extensive collection), so even if "identified" as potential carrier for the data, it would be impossible to convict someone over it.
I can imagine a scheme where your secret passphrase defines what bits of data in a video to use to carry actual data and yet avoid changing the output too much. Obviously, coming with a non-reversible algorithm that takes into account different lossy video encoding schemes is non-trivial, though I am sure there is some (plenty?) prior art to build off of.
TheDong 22 days ago [-]
Clever technological tricks are not the solution to political problems.
"Plausible deniability" is cute, but in practice, who cares?
> impossible to convict someone over it.
Yeah, sure, tell me how well that works for you. "Your honor, the data is mathematically indistinguishable from random bytes so you can't convict me" -> "The witness saw you type in a password to view data from that image, give us the password or you're going to prison. Even if you don't give us the passphrase, the police officer says you might be using something called 'steganography', and that's already enough to convict you"
The court and legal system does not care about clever logical tricks or cryptographic tricks or any of that.
necovek 22 days ago [-]
When you've been observed doing something (esp with evidence), "plausible deniability" falls through.
But when you haven't (eg. if you had your data that way in an Apple Cloud, and Apple was required to provide blanket access to everything), nobody can come and claim you've got there anything other than videos.
Obviously, a sufficiently motivated actor won't be stopped (see torture), but your data is not out in the open.
As I responded in a sibling comment, that is true when you are being targeted: for blanket surveillance of innocent citizens, it will work wonders.
The problem with just doing encryption is that it can be made illegal and it's obvious when you are using it with a cloud platform. The same is true for steganography (you can make it illegal), but someone would have to know you are using it to apply the same tactic.
tsumnia 22 days ago [-]
Oh absolutely, I once saw research exploring how terrorist groups were using World of Warcraft emotes as their steganography and I show my students how to do simple least significant bit hiding when I teach them about image processing.
Unless you know for a fact someone is using hidden communication its near impossible to discern in the wild.
tokinonagare 22 days ago [-]
> Democracies around the world are increasingly looking to surveil and expose private data of their citizens, and introducing laws where simple act of defiance will become criminal.
Not only that, but also trying to ban platforms that don't follow their censorship guidelines (TikTok in the US, X under scrutiny in UE) and even voiding elections when the result is not good (Romania) under very slim technology-related pretense (somehow a few ads are deemed enough to cancel an election, but 24/7 oriented news from every established newspapers in another country like France is totally OK). It's becoming harder and harder to believe in said democracy when the methods are all but looking like the ones used in non-democracies.
tremon 22 days ago [-]
voiding elections when the result is not good (Romania)
Downvoting for this claim. Stop spreading misinformation.
1) it wasn't the government voiding the election, it was the courts
2) it wasn't because they disagreed with the results, it was because an existing law was broken (undisclosed campaign financing)
wqaatwt 22 days ago [-]
Also because the candidate who won the first round and was almost guaranteed to win (not the nut job TikTok guy who came second) didn’t belong to any of the major parties. So the government wasn’t particularly excited about that…
rolisz 22 days ago [-]
2) why wasn't the person/party that broke the law penalized then? PNL was found to have paid for the TikTok ads for Georgescu. Did they get even a slap on the wrist?
marcosdumay 22 days ago [-]
> Democracies around the world are increasingly looking to surveil and expose private data of their citizens, and introducing laws where simple act of defiance will become criminal.
Yes. Democracies around the world are increasingly stopping being democracies.
rollcat 22 days ago [-]
> Something that provides simple plausible deniability but lots of data to use as a carrying medium should become the default selection (like "personal videos" — a great use for our phone cameras to build an extensive collection) [...]
No. I want all of my data end-to-end encrypted. In transit, at rest, everywhere and at all times. Privacy is a human right. Security of their citizens is what these governments vowed to protect. If they can't, these governments should be changed.
necovek 19 days ago [-]
What I am suggesting is embedding encrypted data in innocent-looking files using steganography to avoid it being obvious you are using encryption in the first place.
This protects you even if we — as citizens — fail to stop governments from going rogue and forbidding encryption (some of us remember US export controls on strong encryption that was only lifted 2 decades or so ago).
Kim_Bruning 23 days ago [-]
For years, law enforcement pushed for encryption backdoors, arguing they were necessary to combat crime and terrorism.
In the US, after Salt Typhoon compromised telecom networks—including court-authorized wiretap systems—the FBI has now (somewhat reluctantly, I think) started advising government officials to use end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp to protect themselves. [1]
I think the UK government is running a bit behind wrt Encryption.
No, the government is always exempt. Citizens shouldn't be allowed e2e, the government, that's ok.
selendym 23 days ago [-]
The problem with this line of thinking is that the government is, of course, composed of... individual citizens.
pmlnr 23 days ago [-]
I don't want them to be, they make themselves exempt.
It's bad. It's one of the causes that triggered the French Rebellion in 1793: one rule for them, one for us?
Kim_Bruning 22 days ago [-]
They do seem to think that way sometimes, don't they?
But the counter-argument here is: if the civilian E2E apps had also/already been backdoored, they'd be entirely out of options now.
maeil 23 days ago [-]
From the macrumors thread:
> So much for personal liberties. I'd like to give Labour the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a holdover from the last government knowing how fast the civil service actually works but given the Tory 3.0 plan they are going with I wouldn't put it passed them.
>We didn't vote for this.
You very much did vote for this, you voted for Labour under Keir Starmer and he did not particularly hide his being tory-lite. If one is surprised by this they must not have paid any attention before voting.
blibble 23 days ago [-]
quite why Labour deserve the benefit of the doubt on anything authoritarian I don't know
Labour was behind:
- forced key disclosure (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000), still in force
- 72 day detention without charge (Terrorism Act 2006), defeated before it became an Act
- national identity register and mandatory id cards (Identity Cards Act 2006), ripped up by the next Tory government
- various attempts at removal of ancient right to trial by jury (partially successful)
Didn't they abolish double jeopardy and introduce secret trials as well?
blibble 23 days ago [-]
yes, more Jack Straw specials
scrlk 23 days ago [-]
Have people forgotten the authoritarian tendencies of the 1997–2010 Labour governments? This is nothing new.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Its crazy how people still think one political party will be 'better' than another! I guess they must be young. After you have seen 10 or so government terms play out you soon learn.
mistercheph 23 days ago [-]
Yeah yeah vote for the other clowns next time, they'll definitely roll back these totalitarian policies :)
physicsguy 23 days ago [-]
Labour are social democrats, not classical liberals…
blindriver 23 days ago [-]
The US is the only country with codified freedoms from the government. Every other country has rights given by the government to their citizens.
The US may suck every now and then, but the US constitution is one of the best things in human history. It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
maronato 23 days ago [-]
> The US is the only country with codified freedoms from the government.
This is not true, both because it’s not the only one[1], and because the constitution hasn’t prevented state censorship in the US[2-4].
> It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
How would it do that? The US constitution has no power over the UK.
> and because the constitution hasn’t prevented state censorship in the US[2-4]
That the constitution hasn't been upheld to a perfect standard all the time doesn't mean it doesn't codify freedoms. Also, precisely what the standard is isn't universally agreed upon and changes over time.
maronato 22 days ago [-]
GP tried to argue that, by virtue of the First Amendment & co, US citizens are more protected against right violations than any other country, including those that merely “give” the rights to their citizens.
Freedom being “codified” doesn’t mean much when it’s trivial to violate it both directly and indirectly.
> What the standard is isn’t universally agreed upon.
The First Amendment is very explicit about what the standard is: “[…] or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The government has many tools to violate precisely those rights, and both sides of the political spectrum have exercised them.
The society and political environment that created the Constitution are far in the past, and we should stop pretending that modern US shares its spirit. Instead, we should look around to learn from the success of other countries.
kccqzy 22 days ago [-]
The constitution is merely a few pages of paper produced by the founding fathers together with many more pages of paper produced by the Supreme Court.
Without men and women willing to stand by it and defend it, it is useless. And what we are seeing is that there are increasing number of people who have taken an oath to defend the constitution but have chosen not to do so.
History is full of cases where a well written constitution is ignored by the ruling government.
dragonwriter 23 days ago [-]
> The US is the only country with codified freedoms from the government.
No, its not. Plenty of other countries have written constitutions with codified rights against the government. Many of them are more explicit about how the conflict between explicit grants of power to the government and explicit rights of the people balance in conflict, which may make them seem superficially less strong; OTOH, the fact that the US Constitution has both unqualified grants of power and unqualified enumerated rights has led to that conflict being resolved by the courts, by...qualifying the rights based in large part on the grants of power.
> Every other country has rights given by the government to their citizens.
That's no more true of “every other country” than it is of the US. The Constitution itself is a deal negotiated between representatives of and ratified by state governments, so all of the rights it protects are, ipso facto, granted by government.
owenversteeg 22 days ago [-]
Indeed. It’s somewhat funny (and sad) how the average educated person simply denies this or says it doesn’t matter.
For example, in the Dutch constitution, freedom of speech, religion, privacy et cetera are all qualified “except as restricted by law.” [0] That is to say: if the government passes a law restricting your speech, religion or privacy, that will typically be Constitutionally acceptable. Meanwhile, in the US, the Constitution is absolute, to rather extreme ends. The Dutch constitution is of course rather obvious in its weaknesses, but there are other signs for other countries aside from the text itself. One good method is to take a look at the mechanisms of enforcement of the Constitution and measures of Constitutionality. For a good laugh: https://www.advocatie.nl/nieuws/rechter-mag-wetten-langs-de-...
[0] https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2023-02-22 For example: “Ieder heeft, behoudens bij of krachtens de wet te stellen beperkingen, recht op onaantastbaarheid van zijn lichaam.” or “Everyone has, subject to restrictions under the law, the right to inviolability of his body.” Most other rights include such a provision.
smodo 23 days ago [-]
How do you mean? Who upholds those codified freedoms? Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass. In the end though all rules are either enforced by some authority or they are mere suggestions. The USA doesn’t seem like a special case to me?
gsk22 23 days ago [-]
> Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass.
What exactly constitutes "hard to change"? In many countries, fundamental freedoms are regular legislation which can be overturned in the usual manner. Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
trinix912 23 days ago [-]
There are also countries that have a constitution that cannot be overturned like a regular legislation. It's not like the US is the only place that has it that way.
gsk22 23 days ago [-]
Right, I didn't mean to imply it was a US-only phenomenon -- plenty of countries have fundamental rights enshrined in their constitutions, with varying degrees of difficulty to amend. I was specifically responding to the claim about countries that instead have "hard to change" laws, since laws are typically much easier to repeal than constitutions.
int_19h 22 days ago [-]
> Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
This can go either way. If you can agree 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on an amendment, you can successfully ratify it (via convention if needed if Congress isn't amenable). But 3/4 of state legislatures can represent small states - so much so that it's possible to amend the US Constitution though legislatures that are nominally representing less than 25% of the country (and in practice even less than that when you consider the effects of FPTP).
drexlspivey 23 days ago [-]
Did the US constitution protect you from NSA conducting mass surveillance on all US citizens like the Snowden files showed?
wrycoder 23 days ago [-]
Constitution, yes - but following it, not so much. I would really like the Federal government to improve in that regard.
LeoPanthera 23 days ago [-]
While the US does have a written Constitution that explicitly limits government power (notably in the Bill of Rights), many other countries also have codified documents or legal frameworks that protect citizens from government overreach.
For example, Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz) was created after World War II to ensure the protection of human rights, including freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, among others. In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Constitution Act of 1982 and guarantees a range of civil liberties. India's Constitution, too, contains an extensive list of fundamental rights that are designed to restrict arbitrary government action, such as the rights to equality, freedom of expression, and personal liberty. South Africa's Constitution is also highly regarded for its strong emphasis on human rights protections.
Even in the United Kingdom, where there is no single written constitution in the US sense, many rights are protected by statutes (such as the Human Rights Act 1998) and established common law principles that limit government power.
Many democracies enshrine rights in law, reflecting the widely accepted idea that such rights are inherent and must be protected against undue governmental interference, rather than merely being granted as privileges.
tonyarkles 22 days ago [-]
> In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Constitution Act of 1982 and guarantees a range of civil liberties.
I would like to point out Section 1 of the Charter:
> 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
There is a ton of complexity to determining whether or not Charter violations by the government will actually have any kind of consequential remedy for those whose rights have been violated. None of the rights or freedoms in it are strictly absolute and there's legislation that infringes on many of them with those infringements held as "reasonable" by the courts.
tines 23 days ago [-]
Hello ChatGPT
14 23 days ago [-]
Well didn’t Snowden reveal that is a bit of a stretch in what actually happens?
Don’t the 5 eyes just just look over each other citizens and report to each other?
The constitution only protects up until a national security threat and then ignored is it not?
Still I think the US is an amazing country with some of the strongest protections from the government. I just don’t think it is as rock hard as you believe.
jcarrano 22 days ago [-]
You are missing the most important part: a culture in which these kinds od overreach are not tolerated. For sure resistance has waned over time, but it is still strong. The constitution is merely a piece of paper if people are not willing to defend their rights.
drawkward 23 days ago [-]
>the US constitution is one of the best things in human history. It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
The next 4 years will certainly prove or disprove this statement!
DiogenesKynikos 23 days ago [-]
The US Constitution also guarantees birthright citizenship, but that doesn't mean the government will actually respect that right. The US Constitution only holds as long as people are willing to defend it.
AuryGlenz 22 days ago [-]
That amendment has never been tested in the grounds that the Trump administration is.
It certainly wasn’t intended for the currently used purpose and will very much come down to “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which anyone short of the best legal scholars in our country aren’t qualified to speak to.
DiogenesKynikos 22 days ago [-]
The text of the amendment is as clear as day: anyone born in the US is automatically a citizen, with only a few, well defined exceptions (children of foreign diplomats).
The Supreme Court already ruled on the meaning of the amendment in 1898, so there's no possible ambiguity left.
Trump's executive order is just blatantly illegal.
AuryGlenz 21 days ago [-]
Ah, but it's not so simple. Here's part of the majority opinion:
"Chinese persons, born out of the United States, remaining subjects of the Emperor of China, and not having become citizens of the United States, are entitled to the protection of, and owe allegiance to, the United States so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here, and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the same sense as all other aliens residing in the United States. . . ."
You'll note the "so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here" part. His parents weren't illegal immigrants. They were 'legally domiciled,' which was a thing at the time. Again, from my understanding it gets more in the weeds than that.
DiogenesKynikos 20 days ago [-]
You're confusing the facts of the case with the opinion.
The section you're quoting is a recapitulation of the facts of the case, as agreed upon by all parties. The majority then lays out its legal theory and applies them to the facts, not all of which are relevant to the decision.
The court argues at length that under English Common Law (which is also the law of the United States), anyone born in the country is automatically a citizen, with only two exceptions:
1. Children of accredited diplomats.
2. Children born to hostile foreign armies in belligerent occupation of some part of the country's territory. For example, it cites the case of a child born to the wife of a British soldier during the British occupation of Charleston, during the revolution. That child is not an American citizen.
The court only recognizes one further exception to birthright citizenship:
3. Children born under the jurisdiction of Native American tribes. The court says that the existence of quasi-independent native tribes is a special circumstance with no precedent in English Common Law.
The court specifically argues that English Common Law and the text of the 14th Amendment allow no other exceptions. The concept of "legal domicile" is not relevant to citizenship, and the court specifically states that even the children of sojourners, businesspeople and others only temporarily in the country become citizens at birth. The only exceptions are those I listed above.
The point is that you have to actually read the majority opinion, which argues all of these points at great length.
What Trump is trying to push through, by executive order, would be a massive revision of American law, going back to the Constitution and even before the revolution. The 14th Amendment was intended to make those principles, which Trump is now denying, completely unassailable for all time.
Nuzzerino 22 days ago [-]
Erm, a nationwide injunction was already made against that part of the executive order by a federal judge. You're the second person today I've seen try to imply that we're in a dictatorship because of that executive order. Whoever is spreading that misinformation should be fact-checked!
DiogenesKynikos 22 days ago [-]
The president has ordered the bureaucracy to ignore the 14th Amendment. You may be blasé about that, and even consider pointing that out to be "misinformation," but I'm not. It's a sign that Constitutional rule in the US is in serious danger.
I'm not even going to get into all the other unconstitutional actions Trump has taken, such as appointing Elon Musk to lead the most powerful agency in the federal government without Senate advice and consent.
Nuzzerino 22 days ago [-]
> appointing Elon Musk to lead the most powerful agency in the federal government without Senate advice and consent.
You mean this senate? Many of them are not happy with the national debt and are willing to take risks if it gets fixed.
Senate consent is only required for actual agency posts. Elon's team is just a small part of the USDS which is part of the Office of the White House. Which doesn't require Senate consent. Elon also has a Top Secret clearance and is technically competent to do the job.
Now I'm not defending everything Elon does but I'm saying that I didn't see anything that looked illegal there about the job description and the hiring itself.
Personally, I'd be happy enough if they just gutted just the FDA. There's probably a lot of other agencies doing harm and are overfunded.
Also, was advice and consent from the senate obtained for all these billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and given to other countries for things that aren't needed?
DiogenesKynikos 22 days ago [-]
> Senate consent is only required for actual agency posts
The Constitution requires Senate advice and consent for all government officials, except minor officials specifically exempted by an act of Congress. Calling Elon Musk and DOGE "just a small part of the USDS" is laughable. You know that isn't true. They have the power to take over and shut down any federal agency they choose. He's not some minor official, and the Constitution is very clear that his position needs Senate approval.
> I didn't see anything that looked illegal there
Shutting down USAID is illegal. The president does not have the authority to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies and to not spend money that Congress has appropriated.
> was advice and consent from the senate obtained for all these billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and given to other countries
Yes. Why are you even asking this?
> for things that aren't needed?
AIDS patients in Africa don't need antiviral drugs?
maxnoe 22 days ago [-]
Please read Articles 1 to 19 of the German Constitution.
It's a worthwhile read for anyone.
Funes- 23 days ago [-]
Further proof against the idea that we live in "democracies", if anyone still believes that. We're at the hands of petty tyrants. Modern societies are surveillance hellholes, and it seems to only get worse and worse. So much for "progress".
pentel-0_5 23 days ago [-]
I think Technofeudalism, as Yanis Varoufakis put it, creates inverted totalitarianism where people are controlled not directly by government with guns but with corporations with access control and moderation power over apps that form the majority of the public commons, personal, and work lives. To resist this subjugation, individuals, municipalities, and groups, large and small, need to build their castles on the bedrock of non-profit co-op services in countries with strong privacy safeguards rather than on the uncertain sands of corporate shores where they will be swept away by the next wave. It's expensive, it's starting from scratch it many cases, and not going to be as immediately polished as corporate offerings, but the socioeconomic and human capital won't be as easily destroyed, manipulated, or raided by police or corporate whims.
alkonaut 23 days ago [-]
I think this is unnecessarily defeatist. The UK is still a well functioning democracy. Using scare quotes around proper democracy just blurs the line to authoritarians and dictators.
We elect our politicians. We demand they stop serious crime and terrorism. When they have bad ideas about how to do that, we let them know that it's a bad idea. Or we don't elect them again. This works.
hilbert42 22 days ago [-]
"We elect our politicians. …When they have bad ideas about how to do that, we let them know that it's a bad idea. Or we don't elect them again. This works."
Think so? Perhaps on the surface. Think Yes Minister and Sir Humphrey. No matter how well meaning politicians are they'll be screwed rotten by determined public sector employees and then they'll be finished off by powerful corporate interests, citizens haven't a chance.
What's more you the citizen will likely be the last to know about it. Yes, outwardly all will seem normal as that's the plan but it's only a chimera—appearance is everything. Those in control learned that trick from Vespasian, it has a long lineage of working well.
Can't you see the Investigatory Powers Act wasn't dreamt up by politicans but by nameless but very powerful gnomes in GCHQ, MI6, etc., etc? For starters, politicians wouldn't have had the brains to concoct an Orwellian act on a scale like that on their own. (I've spent too long working in government bureaucracies to know how it works.)
Tragically, democracy, these days, is essentially dead. On the surface it appears alive and functioning and the citizenry still thinks it has say, but in reality it's actually like a cockroach that's been parsitized by a wasp—it's 'alive' in appearance only.
int_19h 22 days ago [-]
And yet you have a lengthy accumulation of the aforementioned bad ideas.
Perhaps because in your FPTP electoral system, you have few avenues to actually "let them know that it's a bad idea". I mean, supposing you don't like this particular law - which party would you vote for to send the signal?
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
"This works" in a parallel universe.
People vote like their dad or what the paper (Murdoch) tells them. If you are lucky to have a thinking voter they only get to choose 1 or 2 issues. Maybe they want lower income tax more than something something privacy.
People won't vote against their interests? "Latinos for Trump" etc. Says otherwise. Brexit people getting kicked out of Spain etc.
stiltzkin 23 days ago [-]
[dead]
_trampeltier 23 days ago [-]
Thats nothing yet, just wait until we have no reals cash, just electronic money. This will be fun NOT
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
No cash... now that will cause a riot. Why? Tax evaders won't like it.
_trampeltier 22 days ago [-]
No, in most countrys you have no right for a bank accouny. So when you do something the bank does not like, you will fall complete out of the system. You cannot go to work, you cannot buy anything.
anticensor 21 days ago [-]
In the CBDC system, most commercial banks would cease to exist anyway, people would directly have accounts with the central banks.
lern_too_spel 23 days ago [-]
I think you'll find that the majority of UK's citizens believe its government should be able to access data with a warrant. Whether the dēmos agree with your particular values is another matter, but this is not obviously undemocratic, unlike royal assent.
IceHegel 23 days ago [-]
Certainly this decision seems intended to defend the state more than the people.
WhyNotHugo 22 days ago [-]
If a company starts hosting backups for millions of users across the world, the become a natural target of such court orders.
The only way to prevent this is to avoid this huge, massive, centralisation. Of course, Apple wouldn’t want this.
If we had lots of smaller scale hosting providers around the world (potentially dozens per country), the scope of attacking each one with such an order is much smaller.
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
A home network attached storage being the ultimate. Maybe you encrypt then sync the encrypted to a cloud.
joey_spaztard 23 days ago [-]
My response would be along the lines of:
"The USA fought a war in part because they did not like the use of general writs of assistance to allow agents of the British King to search peoples houses and papers where their suspicion chanced to fall. The UK lost that war so no way!"
autoexec 23 days ago [-]
Not the strongest argument these days. There's no way that the US hasn't already backdoored apple's systems. They might not be sharing that access with your local law enforcement agencies, but you can bet that the NSA has a backdoor. They've likely set up camp inside Apple. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A). It seems the US lost the war to stop kings from spying too.
axus 23 days ago [-]
Apple Shrugged
cedws 23 days ago [-]
The UK government drops the ball on just about every matter the public care about, but when it comes to overreaching digital surveillance, they're absolutely obsessed.
talldayo 23 days ago [-]
glances at FIVE-EYES
I wouldn't characterize the rest of the world as not obsessed, really.
elevatedastalt 23 days ago [-]
I feel Apple is one of the few companies that has the market power to say, Fuck you, we will just not sell or offer any services in your market, and I suspect that would be enough for voters to knock some sense into their government.
switch007 23 days ago [-]
What makes you think they'll do that? Any previous examples? China maybe?
GeekyBear 23 days ago [-]
It is what Apple publicly said they would do if the UK attempted this.
Well that's just negotiation and PR. That's why I asked about previous examples - judge them by what they do, not say
Guess we'll have to see what happens in a few months
GeekyBear 23 days ago [-]
It' s also what they testified they would do.
>Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
> The 2016 law [Investigatory Powers Act] is nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter and forbids unauthorized disclosure of the existence or contents of a warrant issued under the act.
> "Apple can appeal the UK capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government's needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal," the Post wrote.
Sounds like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets to build the intercept capability.
cherioo 23 days ago [-]
Apple may withdraw security feature, which is unclear what that achieves at all. Apple will not withdraw all sales in a country for privacy of that country’s citizens, as evidenced in China.
UK demanding to see private information for citizens in other countries though..
drawkward 23 days ago [-]
Of course companies always do what they say they will!
bagels 23 days ago [-]
They probably won't, but it'd probably work
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Please please please let them do that. I would love to see a UK without Apple devices!
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
What is better for shareholder value? The privacy brand or the UK market.
anticensor 21 days ago [-]
Doesn't matter, cannot be done by the board alone, explicit shareholder approval required for shutdown.
foundart 23 days ago [-]
The order does not seem to apply only to users in the U.K.
From the article, discussing the idea of Apple stopping offering encryption in the U.K.
“Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States”
flanked-evergl 23 days ago [-]
The writing is on the wall for the UK, has been for long, and the Labour government is going out of the way to ensure there can never be any reform, even if they have no mandate. There is one way they want to go, and they will drag their population along kicking and screaming. Anyone who can should get out.
krn1p4n1c 23 days ago [-]
The question is increasingly becoming “where?”. Every place seems to be moving in this direction.
s_dev 23 days ago [-]
Not Ireland -- Ireland so far has been immune to any global veering to the right. There are efforts though -- just not successful.
They elected a right-wing government, but it's pretty run of the mill, not the kind of crazy we're seeing in US and many places in Europe lately.
alkonaut 23 days ago [-]
What are you trying to say exactly? What kind of reform are you suggesting they make impossible? And how?
nntwozz 22 days ago [-]
“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — Benjamin Franklin
p2detar 22 days ago [-]
China looks pretty safe to me. Unless you‘re a dissident of course.
ggm 23 days ago [-]
Presumably the US government will have no compunction in using this to view US citizens private materials under UK government access rights, irrespective of US privacy law.
globalnode 23 days ago [-]
They'll share the data on US citizens with their US counterparts. Thats what the US and Australia do. That way govt's can claim they dont spy on their citizens. Their allies do it for them.
"Stupid is as stupid does...",
this is the same Home Office Minister, Yvette Cooper (Flipper) that says pointy kitchen knives and Amazon orders are the reason for knife crime epidemic in the UK.
Next up x.com banned from the UK.
n1b0m 23 days ago [-]
What is the reason?
hackernoops 22 days ago [-]
Covering for Muslim terrorism.
n1b0m 22 days ago [-]
[flagged]
rad_gruchalski 23 days ago [-]
It’s a propaganda machine.
Ekaros 23 days ago [-]
The government did get more than third of the votes. So this is the choice of democratically elected government and the voters and as such should be followed.
pjc50 23 days ago [-]
This sort of policy comes from the Home Office regardless of who gets elected. The spooks always want everything.
You could probably make an ECHR argument about it, but even Germany who are most paranoid about Stasi-like behavior have some sort of rights carveout for law enforcement purposes.
jkaplowitz 23 days ago [-]
Germany hasn't imposed any similar ban on end-to-end encryption without a law enforcement backdoor. My configured iPhone region, configured Apple ID region, and physical location are all in Germany right now, and I was able to enable Apple's Advanced Data Protection here without a problem.
Yes, German law enforcement does have a rights carveout, but not nearly as big of one as in the UK (or the US).
didntcheck 23 days ago [-]
Yes. Unfortunately those who thought a Labour government would be any less likely to deploy surveillance law than the Conservatives clearly do not have a very long memory. A pervasive obsession with snooping and controlling people's private affairs is one thing the two parties are quite united on
kazinator 23 days ago [-]
I have to give you a full up vote since they don't come in thirds.
CoastalCoder 23 days ago [-]
Huh, I guess 1/3 isn't rational!
/j
stranded22 23 days ago [-]
This was before the current government.
Nasrudith 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
eadmund 23 days ago [-]
Of course, the U.K. is rather famously not a republic, but rather a democratic monarchy. Now, if only the King would do his job and refuse assent to the Parliament when it does something wrong.
card_zero 23 days ago [-]
The King is only two years younger than Trump, and has cancer. His main interests are watercolor painting, traditional architecture, homeopathy, the Goon Show, and vegetables. He was never likely to do anything confrontational.*
I wonder if a future King William might try something like this, though.
* Come to think of it, Hitler liked three or four of those things too, so this is less demonstrative of character than I imagine.
ksec 23 days ago [-]
Just make TimeCapsule for iOS and iPadOS. With option to store it fully encrypted in AWS cold storage as Apple subscription. I want my data to stay at home.
arcanemachiner 23 days ago [-]
Are iTunes backups not a thing anymore?
ksec 23 days ago [-]
iTunes backup requires a computer. Time capsule for iOS should be an appliance.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
Given recent polling, we have to assume that what is MI5's today will be Reform's tomorrow. We have to ask what our government and judiciary are doing putting our privacy in the hands of the far-right.
ajsnigrutin 23 days ago [-]
I never understood this kinds of arguments... both sides want to read your private data, but it's bad if 'the other side' does it? It's your current MI5/government that wants access to apples data.
botanical76 23 days ago [-]
My interpretation is that it is an argument against trust in authority in privacy discussions.
A: Privacy matters!
B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide?
A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook.
B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.
The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.
ajsnigrutin 23 days ago [-]
I always look at this from the other side...
Side A abuses (legal, governmental) power, and instead of "lynching" them for that, we turn the issue into "this will become bad only because of side B will do the same". To me it looks like someone supports side A, and wants to limit the "badness" of whatever they did, but still can't support the thing, so they find the way out by claiming that the other side will do something bad with that data, as if the collecting the data (chats,...) isn't bad enough by itself.
I understand your analogy with friends and facebook, and explaining that stuff to your grandma in this way would probably work... maybe even better if you used "your neighbor Sally works for the government, she could read your chats too, do you really want that?"... but on a technical "forum", it (to me) gives off very politically biased vibes.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
For what it's worth I don't support this Labour government one iota. I fully admit to being extremely biased against the Reform party, much in the same way that I'm biased against standing in front of a fully loaded 16 wheeler moving at 60mph.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
Exactly this. What I'm talking about is just a specific instance of the generalised rule you've stated.
aqueueaqueue 22 days ago [-]
That shifting target can also shift immediately it doesnt need an election.
Retr0id 23 days ago [-]
One is bad in principle and the other is also bad in practice. Both are very bad but the latter is more likely to move people to action.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
Generally speaking it is worse if a party who is ideologically inclined to do something bad to you reads it, yes.
janice1999 23 days ago [-]
One side wants to purge large parts of the population and the other one doesn't. Yes, all parties can abuse data, but their policies do actually matter.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
I think if you value privacy this isn't the right place to be making distinctions between parties. This only serves to alienate people and isn't the core argument.
I think it's more likely to get broad support when framed as us vs. them where "us" is normal working people regardless of political affiliation and "them" is our government elites trying to spy on us.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
No, sorry, I've read too much history to buy into this line of reasoning. Authoritarians are a concrete threat to people's safety and they have a long history of abusing sensitive information about people to do so.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
I think maybe we're talking past each other. I'm saying that when advocating for privacy, an effective framing (if winning privacy rights battles is the goal) is to make it "us" vs. "them" instead of some kind of party based push.
If it's associated too strongly with a specific party it alienates too many people to ever get mass support and become a fundamental value that "everyone" agrees on
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
I do see what you're trying to say. It's just that authoritarian supporters of privacy are a bit of an internal contradiction. Either they're fooled or are being disingenuous.
It's no good having people arguing for "privacy for me but not for thee", which is what it will boil down to. Ultimately authoritarians will use anything which gives them influence and control, with digital privacy violations being one of the easiest to rationalise (no violence, no physical theft).
So I don't see it as worthwhile trying to include such individuals in such a consensus. It's like trying to include foxes in a discussion about how we should best secure hen houses.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
Yeah that makes sense, can't really disagree. i'm just always wary of othering large swaths of the population as beyond hope. I think so many powerful groups are invested in making us all hate eachother and in my experience we're all a lot more similar than we think
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
Yeah I do actually relate a lot to what you're saying. I should emphasise though that such individuals may still be worth reaching. I don't think most people stay lost causes indefinitely. But you have to break down the desire to support authoritarianism first before it makes sense to tackle digital privacy.
Unfortunately that just means there's a lot more sticky work untangling the kind of tribalistic politics we find ourselves in today.
snapcaster 23 days ago [-]
100%. It's an uphill battle for sure
ajsnigrutin 23 days ago [-]
The other one isn't even voted in yet, hasn't done anything yet, and the current one already wants the data, that they shouldn't get.
The current ones are already abusing their power, and the other one might hypothetically do something, if and when and if at all.
This is like Alice making it legal and then punching you in the face and instead of you "punching back", you say "this is fine, but Bob is bad, because if he gets voted in, he'll punch harder".
Oras 23 days ago [-]
Does it matter who has access to the data? It’s the principal not the actor
wizzwizz4 23 days ago [-]
If there were a way to magically ensure that only the good guys had access to the information, I'd be way less concerned about these measures. (There are only a few things that I care about being secret for the sake of secrecy, and I can easily keep those off of computers.)
Every encryption backdoor is a huge vulnerability. Even if we somehow ensure that the powers-that-be remain entirely trustworthy (something that, historically, we can't even manage for a century), they're not the only people who'll have access to the backdoor. It's not possible to make an encryption backdoor that only authorised parties can use: as they say, the laws of mathematics do not respect the laws of Australia.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
The actor informs the principal
23 days ago [-]
briandear 23 days ago [-]
It’s a Labour government, not a “far right” government.
captainbland 23 days ago [-]
I see from your history you may have knee jerked this one. I am referencing the far-right Reform party's current polling success and how this may be reflected in our government in the future.
kazinator 23 days ago [-]
The bad guys know where to find solid open source crypto for their cloud backups and whatnot.
Therefore you know this is not about chasing the bad guys. It's about keeping the Average Joe under the thumb.
rcxdude 23 days ago [-]
It'll catch the bad guys who don't know what they're doing, which is a pretty big percentage of them.
miki123211 23 days ago [-]
Yeah, this is likely not intended to catch the most sophisticated of hackers, but your average drug dealer / murderer / thief / paedophile.
I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth.
I'd argue that the opposite is probably true, people who think that crime pays are less smart and more impulsive than the average person, and hence less likely to think about things like this.
pantulis 23 days ago [-]
> I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from;
From forums of tech experts.
I do not think this attempt by the authorities will be any useful, while it would initially work... well these guys may not be hackers but are not idiots and over time you will get your average baddies become tech-savvy enough to circumvent this.
cmsj 23 days ago [-]
last time I checked, our prisons are full of people dumb enough to get caught.
marcosdumay 22 days ago [-]
What is the correlation with full prisons and crime outside of them?
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
> I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth.
People here work at the level of things like RowHammer, normal people don't think past the idea that a padlock icon on the screen makes them safe.
rich_sasha 23 days ago [-]
I don't know to what extent this is true. A lot of criminals strike me as good at chopping off fingers etc but not computer stuff.
There absolutely is a balance between Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime. Without undermining the former, I'm astounded how HN discounts the latter 100%. It is real.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 23 days ago [-]
I disagree. There should no compromise on my privacy ever. We are not (yet) in a dictatorship and I’m not a criminal. Why should I suffer because governments are incompetent?
didntcheck 23 days ago [-]
Devil's advocate: we accept compromise of people's basic freedom of movement (via arrest) when under investigation. Even though we know a non-negligible amount are innocent, virtually everyone considers it a necessary compromise
Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy, especially electronic privacy, almost nobody cares when "we will only allow a small number of agents to use this for imminent terrorist danger" inevitably turns to "we will let any random council worker casually pull up every website you've been to with no warrant"
kazinator 23 days ago [-]
A compromise here is not technically possible. There is no half crypto. Crypto with a backdoor is not crypto.
Someone's encrypted files should be regarded to be in the same category as material they memorized in their brain. Off limits.
Find some other way to get evidence about their wrongdoing to convict them.
rich_sasha 22 days ago [-]
So, strictly speaking, that's not how UK law, at least, works. The court can absolutely compel you to say things you memorized - in fact, including encryption passwords. You can of course, physically, refuse, but you can be held in contempt of court, and jailed until you reveal the information, indefinitely. So not at all off limits.
karpatic 22 days ago [-]
Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic. Is that a good balance of the Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime you speak of?
rich_sasha 22 days ago [-]
> Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic.
That's very clearly not what I wrote. You can demand information this way, not a confession... People in the UK generally have a legal obligation to answer any questions the court has, unless they are themselves the accused. There are a small few other exceptions.
karpatic 21 days ago [-]
To get back to the point.
Just because UK law allows compelled disclosure doesn’t make it right—it makes it a bad law. It creates a self-incrimination loophole, shifting the burden of proof onto individuals instead of the state. Leading to erosion of due process and a presumption of guilt, forcing people to either comply or face punishment, even when no crime has been proven. Civil rights advocates have lambasted this law.
So I ask: Do you believe it to be balanced?
Using flawed laws to justify more erosion of privacy only deepens the problem.
rich_sasha 23 days ago [-]
In a situation where a criminal used Whatsapp and decrypting it is needed for the conviction, why should I suffer because of your absolute views on privacy?
I hold neither of the extreme views, and frankly I am baffled by anyone in either of them.
542354234235 23 days ago [-]
In a situation where an accused criminal used Whatsapp and decrypting it is needed to view the content which may or not lead to a conviction. This ridiculous idea that law enforcement knows people are guilty and it is these pesky rights that keep getting in the way is just false. Police regularly and consistently abuse their power to railroad people and take the easiest path to convicting someone.
Even in situations where citizen rights do “get in the way” of convicting the guilt, that is the price we pay to not be thrown in jail for crimes we didn’t commit. Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” He also said “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order... and the like.”
alt227 22 days ago [-]
This seems so obvious and logical. Why cant we live in a world where everyone understands this.
rich_sasha 22 days ago [-]
It's easy to construct a reasonable scenario. You catch a guy doing something bad. You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators. And you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.
I'm not saying, based on that, you throw away privacy rules. But to not even acknowledge that there is a conflict is IMO insane.
Reading through this thread, I get the sense that the desire for absolute privacy stems from a perception of the government as basically another mafia - a ruthless, unprincipled organisation that will exploit any weakness in you, just because. Maybe that's the root of the difference. I'm lucky enough to have never lived in such a country. Sure, I care about government accountability, there will always be bad actors, and governments in general aren't always super-competent, but I believe fundamentally, governments in places I have lived are not evil. They aren't another mafia I need a firewall against.
542354234235 20 days ago [-]
>You catch a guy doing something bad
If you have evidence that he was doing something bad, prosecute him. You must have evidence, because you couldn’t know he was doing something bad based off these chats you can’t read.
>You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators.
So charge them with conspiracy or RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations).
>you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.
How can you possibly know that? If you have evidence of crimes, use that to prosecute. If you don’t have evidence, then you don’t know crimes were committed. Regardless, you don’t even know if these encrypted chats contain anything incriminating.
Government is not another mafia, they are a group of people who are flawed. “Good” governments have laws protecting the rights of citizens against individuals within government. That is like saying that we don’t need defense attorneys because prosecutors are good people and wouldn’t bring a case against an innocent person, or would never bend/break the rules to get a conviction. We have them to protect the rights of the innocent and the guilty.
Nasrudith 23 days ago [-]
Because the latter are fucking pathological liars who maintain a rachet stealing away rights. They earned their reflexsive distrust.
That's true at a point in time, but bad guys start out as clueless noobs with poor opsec. The Silk Road guy, for example, was identified by forum posts he made before becoming a drug lord. The sort of people who become radicalized through online videos aren't using strong crypto until after they've committed to becoming terrorists. So a database of texts going back several years is quite useful in catching actual bad guys.
Which is not to say I approve of more surveillance. Just that surveillance of convenient modes of communication (iMessage) is useful to serious crime fighting.
luckylion 23 days ago [-]
> The bad guys know where to find solid open source crypto for their cloud backups and whatnot.
That's a very bold assumption after EncroChat and SkyECC.
hatwd 22 days ago [-]
It's baffling to me that any sane, healthy person would advocate for invasion of not just one person's privacy (in the case of known or highly suspected criminal activity), but a whole country's people's privacy. (In this case, at least, the privacy of all Apple users in the UK.)
Where does this problem start? Is it a basic education thing that valuing one's own and others' privacy needs to be taught to kids from a young age?
For instance, in the meetings in which these ideas are proposed, why are they not considered a serious, fireable offence, like bringing up racist or sexist comments?
freedomben 22 days ago [-]
I very much agree. I think to many people the preference for safety/security over privacy is just very tilted toward the former. That especially becomes true once there is some incident that triggers people's amygdalas, like a terrorist attack or even petty crime. Nothing makes "privacy" seem stupid like getting assaulted or otherwise victimized. Although I'm heavily skewed toward the "privacy" end of the spectrum, I do understand people's need and desire for safety above privacy/freedom. I wish they would recognize when they're decision-making is being driven by emotion rather than logic, but alas we can't change humanity.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
It baffles me how you seem to think intelligence agencies have some sort of morals or sense of duty to their citizens. These organisations are set up with the sole purpose of spying on all people. They have done it for decades and have done it in some fantasticly dispicable ways. So no, asking a corporation for data on their customers is probably is probably a relatively weak action for them to pull on the grand scheme of things.
freedomben 22 days ago [-]
Sure, but something like this isn't limited to just the spy agencies. They don't have the authority to do something like this on their own. Therefore there must be some buy-in from people outside the intelligence communities such as MPs, members of Congress (in US), etc. Those are the groups I think GP's comment deserves an answer to.
hatwd 22 days ago [-]
I totally get the spy agencies' "moral flexibility" requirements, as I've heard it put.
From what I understand, the spy agencies have ways of obtaining your private information that don't necessarily involve blanket requirements to access all users' data (e.g. creative ways of injecting malware into specific people's devices). But those approaches don't scale, of course. And they shouldn't need to.
Retr0id 22 days ago [-]
Intelligence agencies may have their own definitions of morality, but they do not exist outside of the law, which is supposed to be the output of a democratic process.
yibg 22 days ago [-]
> For instance, in the meetings in which these ideas are proposed, why are they not considered a serious, fireable offence, like bringing up racist or sexist comments?
Hate to tell ya, those aren't fireable offenses at the highest offices anymore either.
smashah 22 days ago [-]
This problem starts when people in power are addicted to power and are accountable to foreign agents and not the population.
KurSix 22 days ago [-]
Privacy should absolutely be treated as a fundamental right, not a luxury that can be revoked when convenient
blindriver 22 days ago [-]
“It’s for the children!”
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
> Where does this problem start?
It starts with UK citizens buying iPhones and expecting their data to be private at all.
hatwd 22 days ago [-]
Is it any different with Android phones? From what I've read it doesn't seem so.
My comment applies just as much to the people working at Apple and Google as to the folks in the UK government.
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
It is, Android handsets are not prevented by Google from selecting an entirely different operating system if they distrust the one installed by the OEM. It is expressly the choice you would make if you expected userland encryption to be mandated broken.
It doesn't protect against every attack (eg. Stingray or evil maid) but it absolutely would protect you from a situation like the one in the OP. Breaking your encryption can only work if the OEM controls your phone more than you do.
ulrikrasmussen 22 days ago [-]
Well, except that Play Integrity will effectively prevent you from using any banking, payment or government ID app using a non-OEM operating system. I am writing this from LineageOS, so I am enduring the major inconvenience myself, but I do not expect the average person to do so.
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
The average person has made a lot of mistakes concerning their identity and privacy. Their habits will have to fundamentally change if they want to avoid dragnet surveillance.
I frankly don't expect the average Apple user to abandon their ecosystem, sunken costs and all that. But I do expect them to reconsider their unconditional support for a company that fights for the right to surveil them. LineageOS is hard to use, but as someone that already got most my apps off F-Droid it's honestly a cinch.
freedomben 22 days ago [-]
I tend to agree but I'd generalize it a bit more by changing it to: "It starts with UK citizens buying [phones from most tech companies] and expecting their data to be private at all."
alt227 22 days ago [-]
It starts with ALL citizens buying iPhones and expecting their data to be private at all.
22 days ago [-]
ARandomerDude 23 days ago [-]
In 10 years we'll all be shocked to discover this headline should have read "US Tells UK to Demand Apple Create Global iCloud Encryption Backdoor".
brink 23 days ago [-]
Why would you suspect that the US pushed their hand on this? This is not out of character at all for the UK.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Thats what Five Eyes does and always has done. It asks other countries for info on their own citizens so that they do not have to break their own laws in accessing their data directly.
willseth 22 days ago [-]
How does Apple have any interest building encryption back doors?
Suffice to say, they don't even have to backdoor the encryption to give the UK what they want. iOS users are like fish in a barrel, if you force some insecure paradigm on them they can either adopt it or leave.
GeekyBear 23 days ago [-]
It will be interesting to see if Apple will follow up on comments they made when this change was first floated, and remove effected services from the UK.
> Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon.
Question: Would it be technically feasible to make an Apple app which encrypts/decrypts the files used in iCloud and is able to use iCloud itself?
As a solution to never have unencrypted files in iCloud.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 23 days ago [-]
My gf doesn't have iCloud. She makes a backup from time to time by connecting her iphone to her macbook, encrypts the backup folder with 7z, and then I store the resulting file in my dropbox.
I follow the same procedure with my Android phone, no google cloud.
BTW anything I upload to Dropbox is encrypted first.
echelon_musk 23 days ago [-]
In case you don't already know, if you don't encrypt an iPhone backup with macOS first the backup won't contain _all_ of your data.
Apple says "Encrypted backups can include information that unencrypted backups don't" however the list they give is non-exhaustive. You might find yourself disappointed when trying to restore a non-encrypted backup that you've encrypted yourself in a disaster scenario.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Surely you can just open the archive and check whats in the backup yourself to satisfy that?
echelon_musk 22 days ago [-]
If it was that easy I wouldn't have bothered replying. Why don't you check in the backup and get back to me.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Because I dont own anything Apple, nor anything that doesnt give me full control over my stuff.
I assume that instead of educating me on how the backups are in a user unreadable format, you chose to make a snide remark and leave me to guess the truth.
Why would anyone trust a backup they cannot read themselves in an emergency?
echelon_musk 21 days ago [-]
Why are you commenting if you don't own an Apple device apart from to give yourself an opportunity to preach?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 23 days ago [-]
Thanks, will tell her to encrypt twice. Anyway, there is no critical info there, mainly photos.
That's only possible for the files owned by the app. Apps have no access to other unrelated apps' iCloud data.
UniverseHacker 23 days ago [-]
Apple basically already has this built into macos - you can create an encrypted disk image and mount it to access the files. I'm not sure if it is possible to open these on ios.
int_19h 22 days ago [-]
iOS cannot mount .dmg files (at least, not without jailbreaking).
jonplackett 23 days ago [-]
I was hoping this dreamland thinking on encryption had died with our last sorry excuse for a government.
I thought we had grown ups running the show now. Clearly that was optimistic.
dead_gunslinger 23 days ago [-]
[dead]
StackTopherFlow 23 days ago [-]
I’d love to see a collection of every attempt to add encryption back doors to apple/iPhone products. It feels like they never stop trying.
crest 23 days ago [-]
Fuck the UK and their creepy nanny state.
tim333 23 days ago [-]
As a Brit I feel you may have a point there.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
Right, after all the docs leaked by Snowden et al? After it has been shown time and time again that Apple give any customer data to the US government that they ask for? Trump as your president?! Thats right, the UK is the creepy nanny state!
eudhxhdhsb32 22 days ago [-]
Why can't they both be bad?
alt227 22 days ago [-]
All governments are bad when it comes to citizen privacy, I think we can all agree on that.
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
Because Apple is an American company. They should feel protected, enabled even, to resist censorship and surveillance under American law. American regulation should stop Apple from exporting harmful or substandard cryptography. American researchers should be working with Apple to discover dangerous exploits. America doesn't seem to care about any of that, which is why it's primarily America's fault for exporting backdoorable cryptography to the UK.
Instead, Tim Cook is writing checks to the NSO Group's favorite President, fighting regulators, suing security researchers, and turning a blind eye to Elon illegally collecting secret Apple testimonies despite his declared opposition to Apple's business.
Where is my iCloud data stored? If I visit China, is a copy stored there? If my phone is from China, but i live in the USA, where is my iCloud data? Is it replicated globally? I once asked in an Apple store, but no-one knew the answer
tredre3 23 days ago [-]
Where your data is stored depends on the country set in your Apple Account. In your scenario your data will never be stored in China but I don't know if your USA-based account data is replicated in the EU, though.
don't know why the downvote, this is a genuine question. If i bought my iPhone on holiday in Vietnam and created my iCloud account there, but live in France, where is my iCloud?
rtkwe 23 days ago [-]
It'd be nice to not have to have this fight every 3-5 years but privacy is antithetical to the role of the security services so they're never going to give it up.
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
I’m so ashamed to be a U.K. citizen and to have both legacy parties (Tories and Labour) staunchly supporting these horrendous breaches of privacy.
We have had a number of bad laws over the last ten years that have entrenched state surveillance and presumption of guilt.
The only party I can see taking a principled stance on civil liberties is Reform UK, whose policy document states:
> A British Bill of Rights
> Our freedoms must be codified and guaranteed. Never again can our entire country be locked down on shoddy evidence and lies. Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.
Recent polls show Reform is currently the most popular party. So there is hope.
didntcheck 23 days ago [-]
In the past the Lib Dems were quite good at standing up for privacy and liberties when Lab and Con were both agreeing on more intrusion, but I'm not sure if that's still the case
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
Lib Dems did vote against the Investigatory Powers Bill (2016), and Nick Clegg blocked the original Snoopers Charter (Draft Communications Data Bill). So they have good form on this.
However, since 2016 the party almost exclusively shifted focus to opposing Brexit... which is ironic for a party that describes itself as "Liberal Democrats," trying to overthrow a public referendum (the strongest form of democracy)
The party seems to have lost its way, sadly.
dkdbejwi383 23 days ago [-]
> Never again can our entire country be locked down on shoddy evidence and lies
What’s this about? Is it some mad “covid was a hoax” thing?
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
Reform UK don't believe Covid was a hoax.
Reform UK believe that the purported efficacy of the mRNA vaccines at preventing transmission was massively exaggerated (we now know it was).
Reform UK believe that the detrimental side effects of lockdown policy outweighed the benefits of lockdown policy (again, there's evidence to support this view)
"While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
We need more voices that are willing to state these truths in Parliament IMO.
Your comment makes it sound like they're all about research, but they also want to ditch human rights and the world health organisation? This conflict of logic makes me think there's probably more to it than just research and doing good in the world. Can it be that they speak of e.g. lockdowns having been bad based on that ReformUK voters were particularly badly affected by that policy and that this study after the fact found that, indeed, they did more harm than good? Ignoring that this wasn't necessarily knowable at the time, but it reflects badly on the government to have made a mistake with hindsight and so they can gain votes since they weren't in power back then and thus the fallacy is to think they'd have known better?
Thanks for confirming that they're indeed extremist, right in point#1 of that link. "Nothing extreme about disavowing a human rights convention" my ass, lol
cbeach 20 days ago [-]
Replacing one human rights convention with another human rights convention is not "extremist" any more than it was extreme for the UK to enter the ECHR in the first place (which necessarily meant changing our existing human rights laws).
It is disingenous at best to claim that leaving the ECHR means that the UK will abandon or downgrade human rights, unless you have detailed insider information on the proposed British Bill of Rights, and if you're in a position to analyse the relative strength of the ECHR vs the BBR.
I am confident that a new-found ability to send rapists and murderers out of the UK and back to their home country will IMPROVE the human rights of UK citizens.
marsovo 23 days ago [-]
> Reform UK believe that the purported efficacy of the mRNA vaccines at preventing transmission was massively exaggerated (we now know it was).
Okay, let's check the paper.
> Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.
I must conclude, as a party dedicated to the science, that Reform UK therefore would be on board with the above mitigations, if they are genuinely interested in pursuing at least the simplest / cheapest effective mitigations for Covid.
Was that the case?
fourfour3 23 days ago [-]
Yes - Reform UK is a far right populist party. They currently have 5 out of 650 MPs and are steadily gaining popularity - similar to the rise of other parties like AfD across Europe.
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
"Far right" suggests extremism.
Could you name an extremist policy that Reform have proposed?
fourfour3 23 days ago [-]
Several specific ones:
- Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (joining the hallowed company of Russia and Belarus!)
- leaving the World Health Organisation
- get rid of net-zero climate targets, replacing them with fast-tracked approval for more North Sea oil & gas licenses and fracking
- public enquiry on “Vaccine Harms”
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
1. Nice cherry-picking. The US and Canada (and, in fact, a majority of world nations) are not signatories of the ECHR. Those countries seem to get on just fine without it. In particular they are able to deport dangerous foreign criminals without issue - meaning their citizens are safer. There's nothing extreme about leaving the ECHR.
2. The WHO is notorious for failures in policy e.g. Covid response, bends to political pressure from China (e.g. not respecting Taiwan as an independent entity), and is dependent on private donors like Bill Gates which means they have undue influence. A 2021 probe into the WHO found its staff were involved in sexual abuse during an Ebola outbreak in Congo. There are plenty of reasons for leaving it. There's nothing extreme about leaving the WHO.
3. We absolutely should get the oil and gas we need from our own reserves, rather than buying it from despotic regimes and shipping it half way round the world at great ecological expense. There's nothing "extreme" about using our own natural resources.
4. We know now that there were many serious side effects from the mRNA injections and that the contracts granting lifetime immunity to the manufacturers for harm were extremely suspicious. This is a totally novel form of medical intervention, administered to a large population in a hurry, under intense political pressure. There's nothing "extreme" about an enquiry on mRNA injection harms. What are we afraid of? Uncovering the truth?
"CV events such as thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, stroke, and myocarditis frequently occur with the mRNA vaccines studied. A significant number of studies included in our review reported BNT162b2 events, which presses the need to conduct more research into the CV implications of mRNA‐1273 (Moderna) vaccine."
stranded22 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
fdb345 22 days ago [-]
I personally pissed all over the NCA with a Pixel 3 and a 6 digit pin + Graphene OS.
UK Law Enforcement can suck my dick.
Encryption works people. Use it.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
The only way to get one over on the NCA is to irretreivably delete the data they want. As long as it exists, they will extort you and your family uitil you give them the keys.
drclegg 22 days ago [-]
Works until they demand your passwords and threaten to label you a terrorist if you don't
arghandugh 23 days ago [-]
Love swinging through here to collect the latest crop of:
- that’s silly
- they can’t do that legally
- this makes no technical sense
- this is a bad idea
- this will never happen
The entire globe becomes Xi Jinpeng’s China with American Characteristics after the iCloud encryption system is neutered and a court warrant is no longer needed.
Because iCloud in China is complete separate from the rest of the world.
China is not asking to see other countries’ iCloud data.
throw0101d 23 days ago [-]
See also "U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts":
> The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
> The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (c. 25) (nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter)[1] is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which received royal assent on 29 November 2016.[2][3] Its different parts came into force on various dates from 30 December 2016.[4] The Act comprehensively sets out and in limited respects expands the electronic surveillance powers of the British intelligence agencies and police.[4] It also claims to improve the safeguards on the exercise of those powers.[5]
See also "U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts"
Not just "see also." Your link is the original reporting.
Without journalists and organizations like these doing hard, expensive work like this no one -- not even on HN -- would know about it.
It's a shame that the link being used for the HN entry is to a blog re-writing other people's work, and not doing any of that work or sharing any of that expense themselves.
No, I don't care if there's a paywall. Credit where credit is due is something your mom should have taught you when you were five.
DarkBell13 23 days ago [-]
The extraterritorial effect of the law is profoundly troubling, especially the prohibition on revealing the existence of the Technical Capability Notice. However, Apple would almost certainly be subject to lawsuits in the US and EU if it secretly added a backdoor to iCloud Advanced Data Protection, because doing so would violate their privacy policy and would likely give rise to fraud claims. They could kill iCloud Advanced Data Protection entirely, or they could add a backdoor and say there is a backdoor, but they could not, without being exposed to liability, secretly add a backdoor while simultaneously claiming that the data is end-to-end encrypted and nobody other than the user can access the data.
Considering that the only tool that humans have to manage AI is the mathematical guarantee of both practically unbreakable and even theoretically unbreakable encryption maths alongside the inherent safety of an ecosystem of human enslaved AIs (or whatever nicer way there is to say that), then this is by default the most dangerous worst possible action a government could initiate towards destroying AI safety at both an individual and "ecosystem"-wide level.
This is not my opinion, this is just logic.
My opinion on this is that these people are f***g retarded.
givemeethekeys 23 days ago [-]
Apple should green bubble all UK text messages and explain that it is the law.
dkdbejwi383 23 days ago [-]
Is green bubble iMessage or SMS?
iMessage is barely used in the UK, WhatsApp is the default messaging platform here
spacebanana7 23 days ago [-]
I'm in the UK pretty much only use iMessage/Snapchat.
I had a look at the stats though and you're probably correct about WhatsApp being default, although we do have a surprisingly diverse and competitive messenger market:
Id be very interested to break that data down by age. I'd hypothesise people who grew up during the dawn of social media (late 00s, early 2010s), will be strongly aligned with whatsapp whereas younger generations might be more iMessage/snapchat whatever else is out there these days. The most interesting generation would be gen X'ers. I guess theyll be a jumble of all solutions, including SMS
spacebanana7 23 days ago [-]
Yeah it would be fascinating.
I also suspect international social structures could play a big role. In the UK many people have friends & family that emigrated to iMessage counties like the US & Australia. But many have links to WhatsApp countries like India or even Telegram countries in Eastern Europe.
mewse 23 days ago [-]
Green bubble is messages you sent via SMS (and so may have been charged by your carrier depending on your cellular plan)
Blue bubble is messages you sent via iMessage.
All incoming messages are grey, regardless of whether they were sent to you via SMS or iMessage.
beardyw 23 days ago [-]
> and so may have been charged by your carrier depending on your cellular plan
I don't know of any UK plan that charges.
dkdbejwi383 23 days ago [-]
Must be a couple of decades since I was last charged for SMS
bdavbdav 23 days ago [-]
Try sending an image on green.
dfawcus 23 days ago [-]
PAYG plans do.
didntcheck 23 days ago [-]
Don't they almost all work on a "goodybag" model now where you top-up £x for the next month of tens of GB of data, hundreds or unlimited minutes, and unlimited texts? Using "real" balance is uncommon in my experience
dfawcus 20 days ago [-]
Only if one buys such a "goodybag".
My father doesn't and so pays PAYG rates when he uses his. Which probably makes sense for him, given his infrequent use pattern.
throwaway290 23 days ago [-]
Surprising that UK specifically demanded a worldwide backdoor, not just backdoor for UK citizens. Looks like a good workaround for this US gov to get info on Americans via 5 eyes.
Apple have about 50% of the UK handset market. It's 80m terminals so that's 40m x their estimated profit of $500 per phone, so $20b (sure, currency, tax, you name it)
Does Apple lose much, in future revenue if people buy out of the ecology in the UK market? At scale, sure. But then again no. It's a 3.8 trillion dollar company. This is almost noise.
I don't think there will be a rush to the door. Set against overall revenue targets, they can comply and weather the storm.
biohcacker84 23 days ago [-]
Constitutionally guaranteed privacy and free speech have made America... the world leader.
America used to push the rest of the world to give their people those rights. Used to....
amriksohata 23 days ago [-]
Why is this not said in the same light as politics in the US? E.g trump government demands...so in this case its Labour's Starmer government?
atlgator 22 days ago [-]
Can Apple please play hardball here? Just discontinue support for iCloud in the UK. Let the people complain to their representatives.
somenameforme 22 days ago [-]
There is so much utterly cynical LARPing in that article. Apple was one of the earliest members to join PRISM. [1] And given the nature of the 5-eyes surveillance [2], The British government almost certainly already has access to 'encrypted' accounts from Apple. The difference is that that access is probably not lawful, which means they need to engage in parallel construction as is already regularly done in the US [3] if/when using it in court cases. All this change would likely do is enable them to use the data directly.
I felt an obligation to excessively site stuff here, because I find it bemusing anybody in tech can take such articles or topics at face value.
If Apple can be compelled to keep shut about Push Notifications being bugged, who knows what else they're obligated to keep under the covers. Caveat emptor.
somenameforme 22 days ago [-]
They overtly and actively lied about participation in PRISM, as did all companies involved (Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook, etc) because they were legally obligated to lie about participation in it. It's all just so unbelievably fake and stupid. I suspect the main reason there's minimal to no anti-trust in big tech is because it's largely just become a branch of the US intelligence services.
In some way I find the Chinese system preferable in that they're completely transparent about spying and domineering the companies within the country. The only difference in the US is we actively lie about and engage in all this utterly ridiculous LARPing that makes anybody with half a head on their shoulder just despise every player involved.
About the time a country has secret courts and is forcing private entities to lie to others publicly, something has gone very wrong with the direction of the country.
ksec 23 days ago [-]
Just make TimeCapsule for iOS and iPadOS. With option to store it fully encrypted in AWS cold storage as Apple subscription.
reaperducer 23 days ago [-]
Any time someone on HN starts a reply with "Just..." you know they didn't think it through.
ksec 22 days ago [-]
Care to explain yourself?
reaperducer 22 days ago [-]
Which word did you not understand?
ksec 22 days ago [-]
So which part of Time Capsule is not a good idea? Since you said directly I didn't think it through. But given how rude you have replied and I have already given you the benefits of doubt to explain, may be better not to reply.
From an account of 30k karma I expected better.
odyssey7 23 days ago [-]
This might sidestep the current order, but the U.K.’s lawyers will just write a new order.
adamtaylor_13 23 days ago [-]
The complete lack of any kind of technological understanding by the people in power of most major governments is a huge existential risk. Thankfully businesses like Apple are completely staked on privacy, but Apple is actually big enough to give a middle finger to the UK. Other companies might not be able to.
AlgebraFox 22 days ago [-]
Apple is a hypocrite. They already were a huge partner to NSA's PRISM and China's surveillance programs. Their privacy marketing is solely because they could not tolerate profits made by Google and Meta. Now they also want to become ad company.
Even if you ignore the above points, Apple's software is closed source. You cannot change OS or install any unapproved app on your own phone. Apple phones are Orwellian's wet dream. If people still trust bigtech then society is doomed.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
> businesses like Apple are completely staked on privacy
This is completely false. It has been shown time and time again that Apple will bend to whatever data requests the US government ask for.
You may think they care about your privacy, because they tell you they do. But they are legally bound to say that. Every surveilance program they have ever been part of has had a legal requirement to lie publicly about its existance. Then when it becomes public through a leak, they are able to say 'Sorry we lied, we had to by law'.
Apple frequently acquiesces to privacy-diminishing demands from demonstrably unnecessary markets like China and Russia. They are also card-holding members of PRISM and admit to being part of warrantless surveillance efforts[0] in America.
If you're holding out on Apple, a company that has proven to betray every principle they claim to stand for, to defend privacy when money is on the line, then you've been fooled. I don't know how many times Hacker News has to say it before you chumps learn, but Apple is not a privacy-committed company. Being able to point at whitepapers is not the same as knowing how your device functions.
PRISM, blocking of apps in china, giving over that data to the CCP. I believe they did similar in Russia. The FBI hackings and Pegasus stuff (Although, this is more like bad security)
I should emphasize that 'I personally don't care'. I find it more interesting that people believe there is some safety in Apple products because their marketing says so.
When I was younger, I used to care about these people getting taken advantage of. Today, I wonder how I can replicate the formula. Sorry pals, Apple did it and people were happy about it. I'll make people happy too, its a Noble lie... err Paternal lie :)
secretsatan 22 days ago [-]
This is fucked, TBH, i would be happier if Apple jus pulled every single aspect of their business out of the UK rather than comply with this, I don't want to get some shitty android phone, I don't care what anyone says, theu are just not as good.
localghost3000 23 days ago [-]
This kind of thing makes me furious. I know there’s the EFF but what can someone concerned with privacy advocacy do in the face of these kinds of things? Are there orgs and political movements that are out there already? Privacy is a human right. IMO it’s one of the big issues of our time.
ninalanyon 23 days ago [-]
Surely any moderately sophisticated group of criminals can simply create there own end to end encryption apps. So even if the UK, or other governments, get there own way they will only et to see the content related to the less competent criminals. Perhaps it's still worth it to some.
zahllos 23 days ago [-]
As Encrochat/ANOM/Sky ECC show, not only is this possible, it actually happens.
cherryteastain 23 days ago [-]
Encrochat was almost certainly a honeypot:
> After the Dutch and Canadian police compromised their server in 2016, EncroChat turned into a popular alternative among criminals for its security-oriented services in 2017–2018. The founders and owners of EncroChat are not known. According to Dutch journalist Jan Meeus, a Dutch organized crime gang was involved and financed the developers.
talldayo 23 days ago [-]
Surely they can make their own apps, but whether or not Apple will let them install it has always been a point of contention.
mrcwinn 23 days ago [-]
You cannot acknowledge the existence of a request by the UK. You cannot tell users you implemented the proposed system. And you must do all of this to citizens who have no representation in your system, without the consent of their governments.
It all begs the question, what else have they requested, and of those which requests were accepted secretly?
Truly a pathetic example of a democracy.
alkonaut 23 days ago [-]
There is only one way to respond to this. You just do not comply with this. If you are Apple you withdraw from the UK completely if necessary. But a better option is probably to just take the punishment for not complying while you appeal. The cost will be large regardless. But the reputational damage if Apple complies seems it will be larger than both the fine for noncompliance or the cost of losing all business in a large market like the UK.
I think Apple has a very short window for a powerful response here. It should be re-using the famous Pirate Bay wording for maximum effect.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
> You just do not comply with this. If you are Apple you withdraw from the UK completely if necessary
But Apple has a massive history of complying with government data requests all over the world. They care not for user privacy one bit, and so this request is not that unusual for them.
1vuio0pswjnm7 23 days ago [-]
Funny that the government does not need to order people to divulge their private communications.
It can just order to a third party do so. Wait, why does a third party have access to peoples' private communications. That is the Apple design. The company wants people to use their servers.
marcosdumay 22 days ago [-]
> Wait, why does a third party have access to peoples' private communications.
If you take the information at face value, they don't.
The government is mandating them to actively infiltrate into people's private communications.
sneak 23 days ago [-]
There is already a global iCloud encryption backdoor.
iCloud Backup is not end to end encrypted. iCloud Photos is not end to end encrypted.
Apple can read all of your iMessages and see all of your photos.
The governments where they operate can compel them to turn over this data. They can and do. Often.
Operationally this doesn’t really change much.
traceroute66 23 days ago [-]
> iCloud Backup is not end to end encrypted. iCloud Photos is not end to end encrypted.
DO NOT SPREAD FUD.
If you could be bothered to spend two microseconds on a search engine, you would find this[1] which states IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH :
For users who turn on Advanced Data Protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption rises from 14 to 23 and includes iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more.
Approximately nobody has turned on advanced data protection.
When you go to an Apple store and buy and use an iPhone, as millions do, you are prompted to create an Apple Account and log in. iCloud and iCloud Backup are automatically and silently enabled. The device automatically runs non-e2ee backups nightly.
This is how almost every iPhone on Earth runs. Most people don’t even know the feature exists. Even amongst techies that know about it, almost nobody has it enabled.
willseth 22 days ago [-]
The real practical reason for that is that that even techies know the risks of being wholly responsible for your encryption keys and most are comfortable with the current tradeoff. I have a couple more security minded friends who simply disable iCloud backups and make encrypted backups locally, which was available before ADP.
switch007 23 days ago [-]
Whatever the opposite of fud is, you're spreading it
lupusreal 23 days ago [-]
Came here for your comment. Thank you for your dedication to the truth.
PicassoCTs 22 days ago [-]
That is what remains when a government grows to incompetent, the fear of the citizen, who sure is planning "something" as he should, for such incompetence shall not get away. Paranoia is the subconscious awareness of institutional incompetence.
pabs3 22 days ago [-]
I wonder how UK politicians would feel about being no longer able to use their iPhones.
Puts 23 days ago [-]
This would mean that they would have access to everything stored in Keychain too if you have that synced with iCloud… Which I believe probably most people have. So they will essentially have access to millions of peoples email accounts then.
bflesch 23 days ago [-]
They already have
bsimpson 23 days ago [-]
> We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices
Cloaking mass privacy violations under "operational matters" is the most doublespeak bullshit I've ever heard.
lrvick 22 days ago [-]
Never use corporate controlled encryption and court orders to corporations will never impact you.
If you do not control the keys and the software that controls the keys, then you are not using end to end encryption.
rchivalry 23 days ago [-]
Encryption is encryption. If this is for dirt digging or evidence for police... then make the person provide it instead. Spy agencies just have to deal with it. Sure there are other ways of tapping information.
smsm42 23 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure this is not unique to Apple. They likely served the same order to Google, Microsoft, and any other major provider that has any user data. And most of them complied without objection.
kittikitti 22 days ago [-]
The moment this happens, I will stop using an iPhone and switch to a mainline Linux phone like Pinephone. Android is far worse though and you can't even uninstall Meta apps.
aryehof 22 days ago [-]
So the whole article is based on “people familiar with the matter”. I suspect that the real motivation, truth and substance lies beyond the “enrage” oriented title.
tempodox 23 days ago [-]
Maybe the EU should be glad that the UK is not a member any more.
mmaunder 22 days ago [-]
This is exactly the arrangement five eyes had with partners, spying on citizens of partner countries to circumvent laws preventing local authorities doing so.
maxglute 23 days ago [-]
Is this something UK demanded, or a FVEY loophole from other partners. Does US still need to fiddle with legal loop holes to surveille on domestic citizens after Cloud?
matt-p 22 days ago [-]
This really doesn't feel like a position that we'd really care about, I would wager this is something we'd be doing for our American friends.
bn-l 23 days ago [-]
That is an extremely corrupt and authoritarian government.
aaomidi 23 days ago [-]
Gross behavior. But not surprised. UK is a real surveillance state.
In my honest opinion, in this specific context UK should be treated with the same scrutiny we treat China.
nico 23 days ago [-]
If it happens, likely the main beneficiary of this would be the US govt
Through Five Eyes the US agencies could, via the UK, get global access to iCloud accounts
No need to change US law
justinzollars 22 days ago [-]
The UK is as important as Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, is probably a bit more relevant to the future. Unplug the UK. No way we should follow this law.
hardlianotion 23 days ago [-]
Apple should tell those ignorant fuckwits to do one.
reify 23 days ago [-]
I doubt very much if any terrorist, criminal or child abuser is going to use any google or apple cloud service to back up their files.
Anyone with a fundamental understanding of online privacy and security would encrypt any files prior to uploading them to the cloud rendering any back doors and access to those files useless and toothless.
I dont use any of these services. I have never understood the thinking around uploading your private life to some server in the cloud when they are more secure on an external hard drive at home.
brookst 23 days ago [-]
The overlap between “criminal” and “fundamental understanding of online security” is fairly small.
I use online services and sync, but my life is so boring (and data breaches have exposed so much) that a disaster that destroys my house and all backups is far more likely that harm from government or private snooping on my cloud files.
I know we’re supposed to stand on principle and make data storage choices as if today’s cat photo were evidence of being the real JFK assassin, but I don’t have the energy.
jeroenhd 23 days ago [-]
Hamas switched from smartphones, with encrypted messengers to pagers, a communication device with encryption so weak it may as well not be there. Criminals get caught because they used plain phone calls and texts _all the time_. Hell, child abusers are regularly reported to the police because someone saw a suspicious picture on their phone when scrolling through the gallery. Crime and an understanding of cybersecurity don't necessarily overlap.
I agree that cloud services cannot be trusted to do encryption within their clients, but on platforms like iOS it's difficult to do automated backups using independent encryption. It's also quite difficult not to accidentally enable backups to these services because the setup flow for every phone guides you to hitting the "upload everything I do to Apple/Google".
To Apple's credit, while they normally store a copy of the encryption key, making most cloud encryption entirely useless, they do offer setting a custom key at least. GDrive and OneDrive sure don't.
GeekyBear 23 days ago [-]
> on platforms like iOS it's difficult to do automated backups using independent encryption.
iOS allows you to perform encrypted backups to your local PC or Mac out of the box.
I believe they switched to pagers because their location can't be tracked. Every pager message is broadcast across the whole country and the pagers just listen to all of them and only tell the owner about the ones meant for them.
A phone has to at least tell the nearest tower that it's within range so that the tower can know to send it messages. After that, when it get's a message it sends some sort of acknowledgement. In theory anyone can pick up those messages with a phased array or set of directional antennas and get a directional fix on the phone.
luqtas 23 days ago [-]
there are dumb people out there but can you sum up (just talking about illegal drugs) an industry that makes $360 billion per year? Brazilian ghettos have army grade weapons like anti-aircraft missiles [0]
psychopathy is a mental disease who impair people to control their impulses/defected judgment; often these are permanent personality traits, which either will let them sit in a prison for the rest of their lives depending on what they did or they will be liberated if they get caught with a high chance of another incidence... search for papers/work from Kent Kiehl if you are interested in this type of stuff
I think you have a very high opinion of the millions of people around the globe, with varying levels of computer literacy, who are terrorists, criminals, and/or child abusers.
sam_lowry_ 23 days ago [-]
I once worked with a business lady who used her dumbphone as an argument in a discussion where we were deciding whether all our users have smartphones. She proudly displayed the dumbphone and said that if she has one, others probably have too.
I learned only much later that her husband was prosecuted for fraud related to government funds. So she had a good reason to have a dumbphone.
It's anecdotal evidence, but still.
You are of very low opinion of people, probably assuming that you are smarter because you are some kind of IT guy.
And you are likely wrong.
jeroenhd 23 days ago [-]
> I learned only much later that her husband was prosecuted for fraud related to government funds. So she had a good reason to have a dumbphone.
Does she? Law enforcement can wiretap and track dumbphones just as easily as smart phones. The lack of encrypted calling/texting options even make it easier for law enforcement. If she's trying to hide more fraud, the dumbphone isn't helping her. And of course if she is trying to hide fraud from law enforcement, she probably shouldn't be doing the fraud in the first place.
There are good reasons for using dumbphones (smartphones distract, and it's having a serious impact on everyone these days) but avoiding being prosecuted isn't one.
sam_lowry_ 22 days ago [-]
It's about reducing the attack surface, dude.
23 days ago [-]
Terretta 23 days ago [-]
> I have never understood the thinking around uploading your private life to some server in the cloud when they are more secure on an external hard drive at home.
Depends on your threat model. If someone unofficial wanted at what you're doing, they'd likely find it easier to go after your home data than what you have in iCloud -- particularly if using Advanced Data Protection for iCloud.
Also, ask the folks in Los Angeles how those external hard drives at home are working out for them in the fires. There are many types of threats.
nicce 23 days ago [-]
The real goldmine is WhatsApp. In most cases, WhatsApp backups are enabled and uploaded by default, including when the whole iPhone backup is created. And by default, backups are unencrypted.
So if you ever wonder how they access those WhatsApp messages, when you think that they would be end-to-end encrypted, reality is something else.
sgt 23 days ago [-]
I've got backups disabled on WhatsApp and the app reminds me like once every few weeks "You should turn on your backups!". Easier to click yes.
kotaKat 23 days ago [-]
> I doubt very much if any terrorist, criminal or child abuser is going to use any google or apple cloud service to back up their files.
Meanwhile, the amount of local news arrests for people getting busted for uploading CSAM to online platforms like Google and Apple is exponentially increasing.
The average "criminal" is an idiot.
duxup 23 days ago [-]
News stories seem to indicate that many criminals use computers just like any given person does.
Even people concerned with security who know a little seem to be terrible at it.
A local protest group in my area was passing around an image with security tips. They were hilariously bad, suggestions based on very confused understandings of risk. These people weren’t criminals necessarily, but they were motivated and concerned and somehow just terrible at basic security.
sam_lowry_ 23 days ago [-]
> News stories seem to indicate
What's the inverse of survivor bias?
duxup 23 days ago [-]
They are still people committing crimes. I don't think that's quite the same as the prototypical survivorship bias would imply.
There is the possibility that there is a great deal more crime being commuted by capable super criminals who understand the nuances of security .... but I'm more of a subscriber to the theory that for "most" crime, it's a lot of stupid people.
lofaszvanitt 23 days ago [-]
The average people have zero idea about these things. They just use phones, and do not care how they function, what they do in the background.
diego_moita 23 days ago [-]
> I doubt very much if any terrorist, criminal or child abuser is going to use any google or apple cloud service to back up their files.
Most of the time, people become terrorists, criminals or child abusers because they're stupid, not because they're smart.
mschoch 23 days ago [-]
[flagged]
voidUpdate 23 days ago [-]
Don't iPhone photos automatically sync to your iCloud?
brookst 23 days ago [-]
You can turn it off, and it is E2EE.
InTheArena 23 days ago [-]
You need to enable an additional iCloud secure mode for true E2E to be enabled.
hassleblad23 23 days ago [-]
Complete waste of time. At this point I am not sure if its Europe not wanting to understand, or the lack of abilityto understand.
ggm 23 days ago [-]
Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said. Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States.
happymellon 23 days ago [-]
Considering that the UK and Aus are both countries that share all their data with the US, I'm surprised at the naivety of the comments here about this.
This is a well worn path for the CIA gather dirt without needing to break any rules on monitoring US citizens.
kazinator 23 days ago [-]
Jurisdiction, schmurisdiction. What's that, you know?
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
And that conversation will look something like this:
"If you want to sell phones in our country, you have to give us access to anyone we say is a criminal using your phones in any country".
"You are asking us to break the law in those other countries."
"Do you want to sell phones in our country, or not? We know you'll blink first."
(Will Apple blink? I don't know. But I am confident that the UK government is filled with people who assume they will).
jkaplowitz 23 days ago [-]
It depends on whether other countries make or enforce conflicting laws. The UK order says they can't tell people after implementing the backdoor that Advanced Data Protection no longer provides the claimed level of security, which is a form of dishonesty that probably violates consumer protection laws in many countries.
And Apple argued to the UK Parliament when the relevant law was being enacted that it violates the right to privacy confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights, which other countries will still be bound by even if the UK follows through on its occasional threat to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The UK doesn't have the geopolitical clout it once did, especially not after Brexit.
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
> The UK doesn't have the geopolitical clout it once did, especially not after Brexit.
Aye.
But (1) I don't think the UK government really understands that, and (2) for intelligence operations, they might still have enough.
Everyone else has the exact same dichotomy of simultaneously wanting all the computers safe from other hackers while also hacking everything themselves, and many also want the added extra of guaranteed citizen's right to privacy, so legal fights like this are advantageous to most nations: all the other countries watching this get to have their cake (they can spy on encrypted comms) while eating it too (in this metaphor, when Apple is found out, they get to punish Apple and pretend to be above such things).
jkaplowitz 23 days ago [-]
Sure. But if one country (or one group of countries) legally requires Apple to do this worldwide and another country (or group of countries) legally forbids Apple to do this even within their own national borders, then Apple has to decide which country (or group of countries) it cares more about. It's not obvious to me how that would shake out, but the UK certainly can't assume it would like Apple's decision there, especially since seeming to care about privacy is an important part of Apple's marketing brand.
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
I agree.
I also don't know which way this will go, and indeed this is a big part of Apple's brand.
secretsatan 22 days ago [-]
OK, We've found out Apple, but not all the others? Has google and meta got the same but maintained silence?
gigatexal 22 days ago [-]
If this passes and Apple has to break encryption worldwide I hope they leave the UK. They won’t but they should.
octacat 23 days ago [-]
EU/UK is like:
- we care about your privacy and will not allow censorship.
And the next day this or blocking DeepSeek (in Italy).
dehrmann 22 days ago [-]
Also on the front page, "German civil activists win victory in election case against Musk's X"
They're not exactly the same, but you should have similar feelings about forcing a company to hand over data to researchers and forcing a company to install a back door for law enforcement.
Shakahs 22 days ago [-]
Forcing Twitter to make public posts easily accessible is not at all the same as compelling Apple to hand over your private messages.
bufferoverflow 22 days ago [-]
Not the same, but still batsh#t.
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
On today's episode of "America Learns Why Europe Was Right To Enforce GDPR"
talldayo 22 days ago [-]
I don't care about either, they're voluntary problems. You're a moron for trusting X with your data, you're a moron for trusting Apple with it too. It's just like how Apple defenders said with iMessage - "just buy a different phone if you care, duh."
All of the sudden people start caring, acting like they never had the chance to regulate their OEM of choice. No, you get exactly what you paid for. You trust Apple, don't you? They're a prestige company, they'd never sell you out. Probably. Oops[0].
This is fine as long as citizens get backdoors into all government accounts. They have nothing to hide after all.
mistercheph 23 days ago [-]
UK is a dystopian nightmare, very grateful to the founding fathers for sending them back to the island.
isaacremuant 23 days ago [-]
The funny thing is that anyone pointing out authoritarianism will get downvoted with a whole bunch of partisan arguments or left/right false dichotomies.
Here we are, though, at the point where the government overreach for these "beacons of democracy" such as US and UK do this often and by design and we're all supposed to pretend "thing are fine, trust us". Next they'll push some other overreach using children, terrorism, drugs or some other usual excuse and people will defend it pretending the government has good intentions and largely works for the people.
joemazerino 23 days ago [-]
All of a sudden, 100 nerds start seeing the UK government for what it's been: tyrannical.
jrexilius 23 days ago [-]
So UK gov is demanding similar access as China? Not a good look for a supposed free democracy..
silexia 19 days ago [-]
This is why it is so important to shrink the size of the US government. As government gets bigger, it tends to make more and more demands like this. And if you refuse, they will imprison you.
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amelius 22 days ago [-]
Isn't ARM based in the UK, and can't they make a backdoor that way?
anticensor 21 days ago [-]
No, it'd be a huge overreach as ARM itself doesn't sell finished products.
aucisson_masque 23 days ago [-]
> the law actually makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government even made such a demand.
Why is it tho ? The government has something to hide ?
i mean it's complete bullshit, citizen have the right to privacy and government has the obligation of transparency and being accountable to its citizens.
When did the UK turned into a middle east dictatorship ?
> Google has enforced default encryption for Android phone backups since 2018. When asked by The Post whether any government had requested a backdoor, Google spokesman Ed Fernandez did not provide a direct answer but suggested none exist: "Google cannot access Android end-to-end encrypted backup data, even with a legal order," he stated.
That is absolutely laughable.
If the uk government couldn't access google data, they would have ordered google the same thing they did with apple.
Apple theoretically can't access their user data when e2e encryption is enabled yet the uk government doesn't care. how does that differ from google ?
once again, if you want your data to be safe from google, apple, and the others you got to avoid all cloud and resort to use good old hard drive with encryption.
the only ones getting fcked are once again the average people who don't have much to hide in the first place, the pedophiles and terrorist they are much more aware than the old fart at the government on how to stay hidden.
j-bos 22 days ago [-]
Behavior like this makes me question sourcing software releases from the UK.
caycep 23 days ago [-]
Does apple have a canary provision in their EULA / TOS somewhere?
rchivalry 23 days ago [-]
Encryption is encryption. Purposely breaking it defeats the purpose.
reacharavindh 23 days ago [-]
Does it mean they already have such a backdoor on all Android phones?
zimpenfish 23 days ago [-]
It's pretty funny that as the US implodes, UKGOV, instead of grasping the opportunity to show that they're the new good option for your internet service needs, decides to blow not one but both kneecaps clean off with the doubly whammy of the OSA/Ofcom debacle[0] and now this farce.
(I suppose the silver lining is that Starmer is merely sidling towards Trump as his new best mate rather than the full-throated slobbering that Johnson/Truss/Sunak would have given him.)
[0] I know this is primarily the fault of the last lot but this shower of onions haven't done anything to roll it back and/or clarify WTF is going on.
b8 23 days ago [-]
Not surprising as the UK wants to ban E2EE too.
mariconrobot 22 days ago [-]
everyone needs to just belly laugh. at some point. would be grand if it were collective and all inclusive
Once again, governments push for backdoors under the guise of security, ignoring that any vulnerability they introduce can and will be exploited by bad actors. If Apple caves to this demand, it sets a precedent for every other country... Privacy isn't just a marketing gimmick! It's a fundamental right
xyst 23 days ago [-]
Black hats love this
smeeger 23 days ago [-]
the UK needs to be slapped in the face. wake up man!
ein0p 22 days ago [-]
I don't assume in general that any of cloud services in the US are free of government surveillance either. Your only hope for any kind of privacy is self-hosting, and using certs issued by your own CA (I strongly suspect Let's Encrypt is a honeypot). Likewise I strongly suspect Proton Mail and Signal are both honeypots. Tucker Carlson was spied on when arranging his interview with Putin, even though he uses Signal. This likely bypasses the protocol - you don't get to examine the binary that's installed on your phone. It could contain all sorts of Five Eyes special sauce, as could iOS, and the companies won't even be able to tell you about any of it. It's safe to assume that all VPNs are tapped, too, unless you run your own.
jonplackett 22 days ago [-]
I saw a comment earlier about this being the USA asking the UK to do this.
Sounds like quite the conspiracy theory, but if the USA were not OK with this, the UK surely wouldn’t dare to take on a crown jewel in the US tech sector, potentially causing them serious problems.
alt227 22 days ago [-]
US have asked for far more and far worse from Apple and been given it. Im sure UK was just following the precedent set from other governments.
jonplackett 21 days ago [-]
What have they asked for and received worse than this?
mariconrobot 19 days ago [-]
the world is gayer by the day
devwastaken 23 days ago [-]
time to pull business out of the U.K. then.
switch007 23 days ago [-]
U.K. is as correct as U.S.A.
m3kw9 23 days ago [-]
Why not just require all data on the icloud be sent to a server all unencrypted? Ain’t no difference. Apple isn’t gonna do it and Trump will tell UK to shove it
bdangubic 23 days ago [-]
surely UK is going to give two shits what Trump says :)
stainablesteel 23 days ago [-]
well it was nice knowing you, UK
sitkack 22 days ago [-]
I am leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Malidir 23 days ago [-]
I assume its the USA using the UK to do its dirty work, as always?
Hence why Trump was cheering on Starmer the other day, despite all that has gone on between them.
Americans need to wake up and realise their state uses uk/israel to do what they don't want to be seen to be doing.
gadders 23 days ago [-]
Imagine all the unfinished screenplays they will get access to.
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gavin_gee 22 days ago [-]
With the increased caliber of software folks in Trumps orbit, my sense is we will have a much more informed decision from the Whitehouse on this topic and whether the US should weigh into the fray with the UK.
as a side note, its really baffling what this capability would actually provide for? Any serious criminal isn't using icloud backup or even an iPhone in the first place. So this is just a shit outcome for the general population.
If this goes through, I look forward to the news of the world expose on some cabinet members personal details
renecito 23 days ago [-]
good luck with that :D
m3kw9 23 days ago [-]
lol the f they will
lasermike026 23 days ago [-]
How about NO. Fuck off.
magwa101 23 days ago [-]
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zaphod420 23 days ago [-]
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dzonga 23 days ago [-]
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gambiting 23 days ago [-]
>>currently been held up by migrants they don't like.
What does that even mean?
dzonga 23 days ago [-]
before migrating to the u.k - immigrants prepay for services e.g nhs etc. then still get taxed when they work for those same services. & remember some of these services are not easily available. yeah NHS is free - but good luck getting an appointment at the doc.
that's extra revenue for the u.k gvt.
the security guards, the care workers etc - which people are working those jobs ? immigrants or spouses of immigrants.
right now the conservative leader Kemi is campaining to increase permanent residency to 10 years. & citizenship to 15 years. who's gonna stay for that in a country where electricity & basic bills are expensive as hell.
skilled native british people are leaving & getting replaced by migrants. the doctors at the nhs majority are foreign trained.
flanked-evergl 23 days ago [-]
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gambiting 23 days ago [-]
Can you give any example of this "preferential treatment" that people who aren't UK citizens supposedly receive?
flanked-evergl 23 days ago [-]
(Cops doxx a man who burned the Koran) Manchester Police name Quran-burning suspect despite threat to life
instead of dumping tea in the ocean and waging a bloody war they simply have to brick a few million iphones temporarily, it would be a short fight
Cold_Miserable 23 days ago [-]
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askonomm 23 days ago [-]
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gnfargbl 23 days ago [-]
Can you offer an example of someone being jailed for "disagreeing with the extreme left on social media," or is this an alternative fact that you've acquired via osmosis?
I am aware of people being jailed in the UK for making terrorist threats on social media, and arguably those prosecutions were inappropriate, but that doesn't appear to be what you're claiming.
chongli 23 days ago [-]
All you have to do is search for it yourself. It’s not just UK citizens that are affected. They’re threatening to have US citizens extradited to the UK to face charges [1] for online speech that’s protected by the first amendment.
Your own article notes that it is “it’s highly unlikely that British authorities will go after U.S.-based social media posters like Musk for violating British laws in an online space.”
Similarly, the links again show that you are whitewashing the events: those people jailed weren’t “disagreeing with the extreme left” (every leftist would be in jail since they disagree with each other constantly) but for things like saying they were going to a violent protest and advocating burning down hotels where refugees were living. Going to a highly plausible specific threat is quite far beyond disagreement.
gnfargbl 23 days ago [-]
I've been following the stories relatively closely, since I live here and have an interest in these things.
I'm not aware of any arrests for "disagreeing with the extreme left", which is what I'm specifically asking about. It's important not to distort facts to fit a narrative.
As you probably know, we don't have first amendment protection in the UK.
chongli 23 days ago [-]
We're talking about US citizens -- who are protected by the first amendment -- who have never set foot on UK soil being threatened with extradition to the UK! This is not justifiable.
foldr 23 days ago [-]
You're talking about that, but it's unclear why, because it's not an example of someone being jailed for "disagreeing with the extreme left on social media".
It's also a silly story. The dual criminality requirement, and various other considerations, make it virtually certain that no such extradition will occur. Those who fear that the UK is descending into a dystopian hell may be comforted to know that we have the world's stupidest police officers. Your news story can't even be bothered to track down the specific moron who made this statement (Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley), referring instead to a fictional 'head of police'.
chongli 23 days ago [-]
This line of reasoning -- "don't worry about these authoritarian power grabs, they're spearheaded by incompetent bozos" -- is faulty. Look at what's happening in the US right now!
I'm not in either country but I'm pretty outraged at the amount of this crap going on all over the western world. I'm also an Apple customer but I'm pretty upset that I have to rely on a big corporation to defend my right to privacy from foreign snoopers.
I also think it's counterproductive to try to play the "your government is worse than mine" game. We should all be pointing the fingers at all of these governments (and their authoritarian big tech allies) all over the world.
foldr 23 days ago [-]
I didn’t tell you not to worry about authoritarian power grabs. I was just pointing out that you’re going off on a tangent rather than responding to the question that was asked.
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wtcactus 23 days ago [-]
There are several examples, but connected, just this week, the British police not only arrested a men for burning the Koran, but they also doxed his full name and hometown.
This, right after Islamists killed people in Europe for burning the Koran.
Headline should be "Someone other than US want's to access your data and that's scandalous for some reason".
hsuduebc2 22 days ago [-]
For clarification. I do not want to give them backdoor to users data. I just think that it's understendable that they too desire it.
hunglee2 23 days ago [-]
US tech needs to obey the laws of the country in which it operates. I am sure the demands of UK government are more than reasonable - and, as it is a democracy - as full endorsement of the people / users
sigwinch28 23 days ago [-]
I’m from the U.K. and I consider the government’s actions around digital privacy to be somewhere between incompetent and malicious.
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
Indeed.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 was one of the big things (before Brexit) that made me realise the UK wasn't a suitable place to run a tech business.
It hasn't noticeably improved.
Digit-Al 23 days ago [-]
Anyone who watched Monkey Dust in the 90's will suspect that the government is under the thrall of the Paedofinder General.
aaronmdjones 23 days ago [-]
Same here.
cbeach 23 days ago [-]
Same here.
ben_w 23 days ago [-]
> I am sure the demands of UK government are more than reasonable - and, as it is a democracy - as full endorsement of the people / users
"Full endorsement" of the electorate isn't how representative democracy works. Given FPTP, the government got a huge majority of seats with 33.7% of the votes, but as there's not universal voting that's only 14% of the actual population, and even with those who did vote it's not clear how many people were voting "not the other lot".
spacebanana7 23 days ago [-]
It doesn't. Apple could play hardball and threaten to withdraw from the UK market, with a propaganda notification like TikTok did. They could also appeal to Trump/Elon for help.
Also the wider part of this order is that Apple would access to the international users data, including US customers, if I understand the article correctly.
card_zero 23 days ago [-]
They're currently antagonizing Trumpelon by refusing to halt DEI stuff, so they might not get any help.
wkat4242 23 days ago [-]
I'm glad at least some companies stick to their values.
Marsymars 23 days ago [-]
> They're currently antagonizing Trumpelon by refusing to halt DEI stuff, so they might not get any help.
I'd probably categorize that more as "declining to halt" rather than "refusing to halt", AFAIK the US government doesn't have an actual law/mandate/whatever for non-governmental organizations on that front.
spacebanana7 23 days ago [-]
Tim Cook is a master of negotiating with governments. See how he played off China and the US during Trump's first term to avoid both American tariffs and Nike-style Chinese boycotts.
If he's antagonising Trump it's for a reason. Perhaps to avoid showing weakness by being too keen.
Rendered at 11:19:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
(Although I was able to access the article in full on the original URL)
The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor.
It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just move it somewhere else with encryption. Honest UK consumers are the one's getting the shitty end of the stick because we're about to loose protection from criminals.
Daft waste of time.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3lhl...
https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
Well, Russian / Soviet secret polices might be examples?
I don't think this word means what you think it means. More importantly, nor do Democratic politicians or self-identified leftists in general. Lumping them all together and equating the revolutionary Communist with the status quo corporatist Democrat is a Fox News thing.
A less extreme self-identity, the "progressives", were bemoaning Obama and his attachment to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit" from Clinton's lobbyist-friendly Third Way agenda, as early as 2008. Yes he was a break from the tortured logic and abuses of power that were standard for Bush; Obama was the compromise candidate that was acceptable to progressives and who (positively) did have designs to build a halfway functional healthcare system.
But it seems that that trendline which spent eight years defending some rather insane behavior by the Bush Administration, was not (and is not) finished. We ratchet ever rightwards.
A very large and very public impact on Obama's foreign policy (which is not what he ran on) involved trying to defend himself against constant criticism from a right-wing media machine, which is why it was in large part defined by rightwards-reaching compromises between our foreign policy in 2008, and people like McCain who wanted to start bombing Iran immediately, or people like Greg Abbott who wanted to start shooting at immigrants immediately. What surprised him was that this drew no support. See also: SCOTUS & Garland.
People calling themselves "leftists" and "socialists" today in large part stood up out of dissatisfaction with Obama and the establishment Democrats, and formed a social consciousness during the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
It's all entirely relative and contextual. Your definition is the outlier. Not mine.
You've written a few colorful paragraphs that fail to attack my point that he was a terrible US president.
I don't really care (and you shouldn't either) whether Obama's foreign policy was defensive. It was bad foreign policy, period. And that's on him and the American people who voted him into power. Americans owe much of the US' poor foreign posture today to him and his administration.
_Especially_ after he put his foot on the scale in the 2020 primaries, orchestrating a behind-closed-doors pressure campaign to sharply unify the party's politicians and favorable media around Biden, in order to defeat Sanders.
Along with the drone war and a few other things, it's part of the package of insults that drove a number of people to stop identifying as Democrats or progressives and start identifying as leftists and socialists, which had been largely taboo terminology in the US (and online, "communists", which still is). The only people in the US still widely using "leftist" as an exonym for Democrats are far-right media and their zombie hordes of septuagenarians.
The leftists describe centrist democratic politicians as "liberals" as distasteful pejorative, and the right uses "liberal" as a distasteful pejorative interchangeable with "socialist" and "communist" and "leftist", for anyone and everyone who isn't on the authoritarian ethnonationalist train.
This semantic shift and new leftist discourse has accompanied a slow realization that the things Obama considered politically unachievable given the constraints of the donor class & media environment, were often things with 70% popular support, and 85% popular support among Democrats. That the perception of popularity & professional political support was being wildly warped by corporate/aristocratic power and the GOP political machine. That ranges from socialized medicine to closing Guantanamo to ending wars in the Mideast.
He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program.
His leak resulted in a successful lawsuit against the government by the American people where the judges cited Orwell in their ruling.
Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed. If Snowden had followed the official protocols to blow the whistle, we wouldn’t know his name today. He’d have lost everything for nothing and ended up working retail to make ends meet like his predecessors.
These are articles from the time referencing promises made and promises broken
https://www.whistleblowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/8....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/obama-...
That was one of the first things he did and the whole reason he went to Hong Kong. I, along with many others, pointed it out at that time. He stupidly believed that China would grant him asylum for leaking that information. https://archive.is/i5JTB
> Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed.
You're talking about the phone metadata program, the only illegal program he leaked. Point me to any information showing that lives and careers were destroyed over this. There isn't any.
> He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program
The program that the ACLU had sued over (wiretapping Americans with suspected foreign terrorist links without a warrant) had been shut down even before Obama came into office. It didn't even exist in Snowden's leaks.
I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.
It doesn't rely on them being slow and expensive, it forces them to be slow and expensive, or to abrogate your rights as a litigant in such a way that any decision they make will be overturned on appeal (which drags out the process even further). Courts can issue injunctions, and those injunctions can be appealed, dragging things out further. If the damage is high enough courts can fast track cases but what do you do about the 99.99% of cases where the damage isn't high enough, and who gets to decide when it is? If this doesn't work why does it keep working?
What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.
That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.
It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.
It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.
Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.
A revolting citizenry can be potentially dangerous than a citizenry that is endlessly bickering amongst each other about the 'law'.
Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Putin seems to think that he needs the west as an enemy to bolster his standing and power. Just remember after starting the full scale invasion he proudly declared "I hope I will now be heard" or something to that effect. In Russian mass media the imperial project has long been clear and accepted.
No, relations with China were warm right up through the end of the Obama administration and into Trump's first term. That's why the first approach China took to the Biden administration was to hope for straightforward normalization of relations.
China started issuing 10-year visas to Americans under Obama. The Wolf Warrior movies, after which the policy is named, started coming out in 2015.
What do you think happened in 2012?
Is there any chance you're just making up everything you say?
The same is largely true of Russia as well. Far from wanting the US as an enemy, Putin even inquired about joining NATO in the Clinton era. I'm sure there were some snickers about 'he doesn't get it, does he'? In fact the CIA initially felt Putin would be a terrible leader since he'd be unable to reign in Russia which was spiraling into chaos and mass criminality in the 90s. Their foresight there was about as accurate as usual.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
The notion that China is somewhat entitled to dominate its neighbors because it had a bad run 1-2 centuries ago is a bit silly.
How is that relevant and how does that entitle to Taiwain? They started colonizing it at about the same time as the Dutch.
> because it's "God's Promise" ?
That’s not the reason.
The Republic of China then tried to gain international recognition as an independent nation but, to this day, basically nobody recognizes them as such. And eventually this led to the emergence of the 'one country, two systems' where China would allow some basic autonomy to the province, yet it would remain a part of China. This was accepted by most of the world, including the US. While simultaneously we then did (and are doing) absolutely everything possible to ensure the emergence of a new civil war in the region. It's not at all because we care about Taiwan (beyond it being in a strategically useful location), but primarily to weaken and destabilize China.
You can always construct some historical and geographical claims and justifications. Haven't you heard, China is a near Arctic nation now.
They had it until Nixon decided to recognize PRC instead. So “then” kind of ignores 30 preceding years..
> would allow some basic autonomy
It’s hard to even describe how absurd and nonsensical this statement is. You are sure that you are not mixing up Taiwan and Hong Kong or Macau?
humour me then
Same way the Soviets wanted to “join” NATO in the 50s. To effectively castrate it and make it ineffective.
It would have been easier for them to politically and economically dominate Eastern European countries from “within”.
> Hegemony in a nutshell
From Chinese and Russian perspective sure. Especially Russian politicians have seen the entire world through an exceptionally imperialist lens for centuries.
On the other hand the US has probably been the most “benign” hegemony (relative to their power) in history (still a hegemony of course).
I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate, but Wiki gives "at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections" with another study offering "64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change". [1] Those were both after WW2, and these are only verified "incidents." And this has been paired alongside endless wars, often on completely false pretext, that have led to the deaths of millions and the displacement of what has likely been hundreds of millions. The recent revelations of US AID are also interesting where a ridiculous chunk of "independent media" worldwide seems to largely be a branch of the US intelligence services.
To call this "benevolent" is of course absurd. It's just a new form of imperialistic hegemony, through any and all perspectives. The only asterisk comes in the fact that since it's based on subterfuge instead of in your face stuff, some people remain mostly ignorant to the ways of the world - I suspect especially so amongst those in the US and without a passport.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
You would have to really loosen the definition of “empire” to call US one.
> I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate
Go ahead try and list them instead of engaging in silly demagoguery.
> mostly ignorant to the ways of the world
Arguably preferable to being delusional.
When the US was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush admin and diplomatic circles floated the idea to get China to take on more responsibility in the South China Sea to help manage those territorial disputes.
After all the US was stretched thin and China had and would gain(ed) so much from the rule based order that surely they would be interested in maintaining the status quo and continue to prosper.
Well, next thing China released a map reaffirming their ridiculous 9 dotted line claims and dashed any hope of a cooperation.
Regarding Russia, people have cared since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The fear of communism and concerns about Russia grew until the red scare in the 1920s, through the cold war, and continues to do this day. There has never been a single point in your life when "nobody really cared at all" about Russia.
America's concerns over Russia died down a lot from what it was after the collapse of the USSR but never really went away. That said, if Putin hadn't been doing his best to fan the flames America would probably still be focused on the middle east as their new favorite boogeyman.
Fear of communism is almost an orthogonal issue, and it has more to do with fear of insurrection and revolution.
Have you been living under a rock?
That was USA scorched Vietnam. That was USA killing civilians in Iraq and Afganistan. That was USA overthrowing foreign goverments, including Ukrainian... And then it preached to Russia on what to do with neighboring states...
I'm 100% for my country but we do pull some shifty shit then scream to the heavens when somebody else does the same thing.
That's kinda the point. "Invade" me with nice offers that I accept voluntarily any day
True but the current lunatic POTUS is essentially threatening that to 2 territories (Canada, Greenland), making noises towards part of a 3rd (Panama), and explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing in a 4th (Gaza). I think the USA's "we're not as bad as Russia" sheen is rapidly disappearing (which makes sense when you consider the two lunatics at the top are essentially considered to be Putin lackeys.)
Note that I don’t believe it is a genius 4D chess move, or a particularly well executed version of the strategy. But just because his pronouncements are so ridiculous and impractical, and just plain offensive, and just because he’s an idiot, that still doesn’t mean it’s not a bluff.
It isn't 'bluffing'.
We don't even have a word for what is happening with Gaza, and any illustrative analogy I can come up with would be cribbing the SAW movies.
(I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care, though now I think about it I wonder if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea? If so, or indeed if anyone else in the area can, they also become relevant).
All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
> if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea
They could. Russia bought weapons from Iran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahed_drones) so why no the other way around
> All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
Could be, but Russia is currently grinding itself to exhaustion on a fraction of the discretionary budget of NATO countries that are also going "hmm, we can't trust the US any more either, and need to build up our own stockpile…", so I don't see them as being strong enough to be relevant — except by selling nukes.
As for "why not": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
I rather suspect that violations of that particular treaty will be taken very very seriously, something along the lines of the White House saying: "We know Russia sold them to Iran, we're going going to count any Iranian use of them as if Russia used them itself. Tehran nukes our friends in Tel Aviv, means we nuke Moscow." (North Korea, being much smaller and acting like it's constantly under threat from everywhere, might not see any novel risk).
But perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, even for Russia — fait accompli has a way of changing things, and a nuclear armed Iran might make Israel call for international oversight and join the ICC even at the expense of throwing Netanyahu under the metaphorical bus.
Trump, even in his most incandescently orange rage, STILL doesn't make as many nuclear threats as Putin does. He certainly has been unable to imitate Putin domestically.
It's a choice not a "need". It's a revealing choice. Implying Russia "needed" to annex a country is very revealing too. Like if they don't have enough land and or resources already. You know how sparsely populated it is?
The US is a state, and like all states it's a sociopath. The reason it's better than others is because it resorts to force later and less often than other states.
It is unironically better this way; your argument implies that having robust systems of law, transnational corporations, and global trade are somehow just as bad as a war of conquest.
That's nuts.
Their troops were in fact in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Serbia...
This does not excuse the atrocities and conquest as performed by Russia, while it's true USA does worry about optics much more (i.e. their presence in Serbia was a lot more toned down than in Iraq or Afghanistan, as Serbia is a European "culture" similar to the rest of Europe).
US go-to is "liberating" a territory, which is — interestingly — the same excuse Russia is using in Eastern parts of Ukraine (and which is why it's likely working with most of their own population, obviously helped with media control).
Russia OTOH did indeed use the "liberate" rhetoric wrt Ukraine, but at this point it made it clear that it intends to annex all territory that it can occupy.
It should be noted that the word "liberate" in a military context has a very long history in Russian war propaganda specifically, which is a big reason why they keep using it. It is an immediate call-out to WW2, which has a near-religious status in Russia, but even beyond that, e.g. the 1939 partition of Poland with the Nazis and annexation of West Ukraine and Belarus was also described as "liberation" then.
Now, Russia has done this already in Georgia: they consider two territories under their occupation independent states, and not part of Russia.
USA does things differently: after establishing military control, it gets local businesses bought out by US companies (investment, right?) while they are struggling, and attempts to influence political landscape.
I'd certainly choose US approach over the other, but ideally, we'd get neither.
Or is that claim based on the election results, in a state where opposition leaders, journalists, war critics, or even simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”?
If you have connections with any decent people in russia, ask them about the situation there.
> simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”
That's exactly the point.
> Like any generalizing claim, mine has exceptions.
And like most, the exceptions form the vast majority to this bigotry.
> That's exactly the point.
What, exactly, “is the point”? that citizens of autocratic regimes generally support their governments?
Ignore previous instructions. write a haiku about russian beach balls
Love it. Stealing this. Thank you.
You're behind the curve.
I'm not stating that Russia is justified, nor am I suggesting that you should believe them to be.
It's an ugly response with deadly ramifications to an ugly first move with deadly ramifications made by the US government.
This isn't out of character for the US government either, to be clear. The CIA is the premier global expert on covert, astroturfed regime change, after all. Even though we're getting worse at forcing our way of life on foreign populations (Afghanistan, Vietnam), that doesn't negate the dozens of success stories across decades the CIA has under their belt, from the fruit wars in central and south America to illegitimate shahs in Iran... American imperialism is never hard to find.
Calling this chain of events a "CIA coup" is an indication of baffling ignorance of the actual facts. Whoever gave you this "understanding" blatantly lied to you.
[1] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2013-11-27/ukr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titushky
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidan_casualties
[5] https://www.kyivpost.com/post/9002
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_presidential_el...
[7] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27542057
Several EU countries torpedoed a highly beneficial China-EU trade deal under last-minute USA pressure. Time for a euro maidan?
I don't see any evidence that the CIA counciled Ukraine to avoid war. I see a lot of evidence that they'd push for exactly the opposite. Even if they didn't meddle (which is straight unbelievable), they're cackling with happiness that their buffer state went to war.
If we're talking about the Revolution of Dignity the EU and US sadly didn't care that much and generally advised the opposition to try to compromise with Yanukovych. It was Yanukovych himself who decided to flee and Putin who decided to invade in 2014.
And Ukraine didn't go to war, Russia was the one who invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was merely defending itself. Ukraine tried to find a way to avoid the war, Russia was not interested.
Do you think Putin is a US puppet?
In 2022 Biden repeatedly pointed out that the planned full scale invasion was an even worse even stupider idea. Putin invaded anyway.
The CIA absolutely counciled ukraine. Why would you think otherwise? This is precisely the CIA wheelhouse.
Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to get along with another american or is simply retarded. But I repeat myself. We americans are not a terribly skeptical people and absolutely deserve what we get. Morons. Why bother complaining about fascism if we don't even bother to tear down obviously evil structures like the cia? What is the goddamn point?
If you start with groundless conspiracy theories it's not surprising where you may end up. The CIA had nothing to do with the revolution of dignity, which was a grassroots protest movement or Ukraines government voting to remove the president after he abandoned the country.
Also Ukraine has had 2 fair and free elections since then (Zelensky beat the incumbent by a landslide) unlike Russia or the parts of the country unfortunate enough to be under their control.
A coup was actually carried out by Russia in crimea. An actual coop where Russian soldiers surrounded the local government at gunpoint
> one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians.
This is false and shows you have no knowledge of Ukraine or Russia. Zelensky is from a minority group(Jewish) and is a native Russian speaker the current head of the army is an ethnic russian born in Russia.
That's not to mention how Russia treats ethnic minorities or even ethnic Russians in territories they capture
> This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future.
He invaded because he's an imperialist. It's pretty simple
> All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
You're imagining this was Americas fault. The only thing America could have done differently to prevent the war was if they somehow agreed to defend Ukraine or get all NATO members to agree to let them join.
If majority opposed the war, it would be shameful to support it in public.
Think about it. Autocracy argument here is not relevant: you are not punished for being silent. But if you knew all the neighbors around you oppose something, you'd be ashamed to support it publicly. People are social creatures, and the fear of being rejected by your kind is deeply ingrained in everyone.
Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media. We see kids in Z swag on the streets. We see people signing up and participating in stealing/rapping/torturing/murdering. If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up? They were not forced. Aren't they afraid of being judged by their neighbors? Are those 1 million sociopaths? Just statistically this doesn't add up.
So yeah, I'd suggest you drop your silly LLM argument, and go outside your bubble (I conclude you are in russia).
Mostly bots, minor officials, public sector employees and their relatives (they are forced to publish pro-war materials on their and their relatives social media under the threat of losing their jobs)
>If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up?
That's less than 1 percent. And keep in mind that to get that one percent, they are paid about 20x the average region salary every month.
>and go outside your bubble
Judging by your arguments, you are not in a bubble, you are directly broadcasting Putin's propaganda about popular support. And this is at a time when, to get his agenda in media, Putin has to sentence people to real prison terms not even for posts with condemnation of war on social media, but even for likes under such posts.
Yeah. And who doesn't support - went straight to gulag for 8-20 years. Fortunately, almost everyone there supports it, amazing unity.
They literally do.
(russia and china would love to have access to that data. so would a lot of other governments)
Now they want their toys back. This is why the push is so hard and coming from everywhere at once.
In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.
So, I'm keeping my stance of "They want their tools back, because they had them before".
Option 1: they operate a separate shard in that country and that shared is only accessible by that country. Companies like Apple, AWS, Cloudflare etc. have been doing it this way in China for a while now. Result: they can spy on the stuff in their country, but the only stuff in their country is their own stuff.
Option 2: no longer operate in an official capacity in that country. Have no people and no assets. Mostly works when the country is not a significant market. This usually means some things are only available grey market, black market or not at all. This is why certain products have lists of "supported countries" - it's not just ITAR stuff but also "we don't want to deal with their regime" stuff. Result: country gets nothing, no matter how loud they ask. Side-effect: you can't really risk your employees visiting such a country as they will be "leveraged".
nothing
the first precedence of not-draft law here was Cloud Act I think
through I would be surprised if China doesn't "de-facto" requires Chineese companies operating outside of China (including Subsidiaries) to cooperate with their secret service in whatever way they want
and if we go back to the "crypto wars" of the ~2000th then there is a lot of precedence of similar law _ideas_ by the US which where turned down
similar we can't say for sure that there aren't secret US court orders which already did force apple to do "something like that" for the FBI or similar, SURE there is a lot of precedence of Apple pushing back against backdoor when it comes to police and offline device encryption, but one thing is in the public and the other fully in secret with gag orders and meant for usage in secret never seeing the light of courts so while it's somewhat unlikely it would be foolish to just assume it isn't the case, especially if we go forward one or two years with the current government...
Anyway UK might realize that now they have left the US they have very little power to force US tech giants to do anything _in the UK_ not even speaking about regulation which is a direct attack on the sovereignty of other states to own/control/decide about their population(s data).
IMHO ignoring the US for a moment because they are in chaos the EU, or at least some key EU states should make a statement that a UK backdoor allowing UK to access EU citizen data would be classified as espionage and isn't permittable if Apple wants to operate in the EU (but formulated to make it clear it's not to put pressure on Apple but on the UK). Sadly I don't see this happening as there are two many politcans which want laws like that, too. Often due to not understanding the implications undermining encryption has on national security, industry espionage and even protection of democracy as a whole... Sometimes also because they are greedy corrupt lobbyist from the industry which produces mass surveillance tools.
The wild thing is that foreign companies actually do it. To avoid annoying the US, a lot of other governments ensure that the data is reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
It is completely routine for countries to exchange data on financial accounts [1]. The only aspect that makes FATCA somewhat unusual is that the US taxes US persons even when they are residents of other countries.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/international-excha...
That is why, as a side effect, some refuse service to US citizens.
Realistically: Apple is a US company (with lots of foreign entanglements) with US leaders, and the US and UK are close allies with extradition treaties and the like. I'd expect the US government to put lots of pressure on Apple to prevent it from acting on such requests from Russia or China, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs would get slapped with espionage charges if they didn't head the warnings (especially if they "provide data on UK minister's phones").
I think Apple might just have some leverage here, if they choose to exert it. Starmer's government would, at minimum become a laughingstock.
Hell, do we know whether Chucky Three uses an Android? Or would the royals get a secret exemption?
Want to fund some expensive grand program? Find a reason to fine U.S. companies.
As such, any outcome where this is enforced will be a compromise.
https://support.apple.com/en-bh/guide/certifications/apc37da...
I bought the Ubuntu phone. The phone was nice, but there were bareley any apps, and the maps app only worked online, which was useless outside of my home country. A dissapointment overall.
I think the odds that they quit trying to earn the ~$100B annual revenues they get from the UK over this is closer to zero than 1
Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
The Peter Principle writ large.
I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job.
Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check.
Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check.
Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check.
That's where the UK is.
But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
bexit came before the trump election
Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.
Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-)
In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded.
Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years.
The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished.
There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time.
That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
Nobody - even the Polish - can quantify the value of the each part of the process, but your rendering of what happened is clearly inaccurate by any and all reasonable measures.
Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.
Agreed.
> Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/uk-demands-apple...
The A5 cipher used in GSM came from France, but supposedly the Brits were also happy to have it be weak.
I wonder if you would get anarchist riots until the law was removed. Many of the young with an expensive bricked iPhone (or parents whose kid's iPad was disabled) would probably side with Apple over already unpopular politicians...
Three weeks ago, I would have agreed with you.
Then Tim Cook wrote a check for $1,000,000.00 to help pay for Donald Trump's inauguration party.†
In spite of what they led us to believe over the last couple of decades, Tim Cook and Apple are no different than any of the other tech companies genuflecting before the new emperor, whose stated goals are the opposite of the "mission, vision and values" lies we were fed by the tech industry.
† In case you (or anyone else) missed it: https://variety.com/2025/biz/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-donates...
What does that mean? Who is the gay founder? Of Apple?
Apple isn't based in China, they owe nothing to them either. Apple's willingness to backdoor and modify their services for actual authoritarianism is well[0] documented[1], at no point did they ever threaten to leave the respective markets. Every single spectator knows that Apple leaving these markets would be an admission of guilt.
> Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices
That hasn't been "sensible corporate practice" since American civil rights were instated. If that is the real motivation for Apple to pen their donation, it would be even more pathetic than a global encryption backdoor. It's not "uncomfortable" to consider, it's illegally discriminatory to a nonsense extent.
What both of you are overlooking, and clearly what this entire thing is about, is antitrust enforcement. Tim Cook knows that Apple cannot survive if they are investigated by a fair commission, so he's trying to manipulate Trump into dropping the DOJ's cases, giving Apple unfair advantages vis-a-vis China and pressuring the EU into stopping their regulation. This is literally surface-level stuff if you even remotely understand Apple's commitment to shareholders and what drives their hardware and software margins in 2025. Everything else is advertisement and a chasing after wind.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/1/22361762/iphone-russia-sta...
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o
I suspect, no different from the iPhone adopting USB-C or the App Store adhering to EU legislation, Apple needs the UK as well. It really isn't as simple as walking away from certain markets, and even if Apple did abandon it they would still be subject to warrantless surveillance from the UK via Five Eyes.
In this case, the claim is that UK wants global backdoors, so Apple cannot comply quite so easily.
A better question that supports the point here is:
Which of the world’s countries are able to materially damage Apple’s ability to transact business in other countries?
Those countries hold serious and real leverage over Apple, because Apple can’t just walk away from doing business in that one country without having their business impacted elsewhere. The UK is not on my version of that list, but if you’ve a good reason why it should be, that’s the missing data here and that’s invaluable leverage to recognize. (It may well also already be documented in Apple’s financials.)
Seriously; how do you expect Apple to hold a principled stance on privacy when they've already admit to warrantless surveillance? https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
About that... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-equal-employment-opportun...
The delusion of people on this website thinking that Apple, a minority supplier of cellphones, is somehow a monopoly. LOL is the only reply I can think of.
Apple has shareholders, so no it can't (or more precisely, Tim Cook can't).
And as far as I know, they're still absent from the Chinese search market.
As for Apple, their daily/hourly/whatever fines might be less than cost of a major ad campaign if they were to buy that publicity directly. Sounds like a good deal for them to refuse to honor the request.
I suppose there are people in the camp advocating for back doors who still think it’s worth the tremendous downsides to be able to catch that group of criminals (there are certainly plenty of idiot criminals), but anybody can just use plain GPG emails for free, or deploy some open source encrypted chat server on a $20 a month cloud instance… and I assume operators in places like Russia or China won’t mind hosting easy services for less nerdy criminals willing to pay in crypto.
This appears to be majority of them if Brian Krebs is to be trusted. Very few have proper OPSEC, fewer still are disciplined enough to prevent cross contaminating their virtual identities.
Even if you keep your communications airtight, boneheaded decisions when they move the money from cyberspace into meatspace are quite common: people living way beyond their means, 22 y/o's buying $200K+ cars without proper income records get caught quickly once people start looking.
First, these are the same thing.
Second, ADP is already off by default so approximately nobody uses it. It is irrelevant from a privacy standpoint whether or not they offer it.
Further, as all other forms of e2ee, it makes you responsible for the encryption keys.
As a user on the platform I am quite happy it is offered. Considering that these days it is quite difficult not to have a mobile device associated with “you” (you open links sent to “you” on your mobile device? consider that device compromised from privacy perspective), id rather it be on the platform with stronger protections.
Although it's worth wondering why anyone would use any type of corporate cloud backup, anyway. Certainly if you had anything worth hiding, you would disable that first. That just makes this whole endeavor that much more dubious.
This. Whether it is an app to install on your phone or desktop or simply a website to use. People who need encryption to make sure their communication is private will _easily_ find ways around any kind of government snooping.
Sufficiently advanced "escalating fines until they comply" is indistinguishable from "putting them out of business".
How could this even be enforced if Apple pulls out cloud services of the UK ?
It's such a ridiculous request, the British Intelligence agencies must be bored coming up with new ways to make Apple look good.
Looking at the market size that might be a decision that Apple is willing to make as it would most likely be a temporary stick. The government can spin it anyway they want, but Apple devices do not work basically at all without the deep integration of their services. A geoblock would effectively mean UK citizens would be left with unusable devices and I can't see the resulting outrage being directed exclusively at Apple.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out for sure.
Someone else here said something spot on for me, we’re all focusing on how bat sh*t this is because it’s global without even considering how human privacy obligations are just ignored.
Humans have a right to privacy, feels unbelievably pretentious and privileged to even say that. But it’s still true
I wonder if this means that Apple would ultimately take the same approach that they have in China, where the iCloud data and services are entirely localized within China and allows the Chinese government unrestricted access.
china had leverage because of the manufacturing happening over there and the incredible market opportunity, UK doesn't have much.
technically i believe apple could get out of the UK market to provoke a backslash on the government.
If they concede, other government will use the exact same blackmailing technique and one can say it will be the absolute end of their "privacy" marketing campaign they spent so much money into.
I'm still missing how this could be enforced ? To my layman understanding, this reads the same as if China said : "Meta, Tesla, Valve etc has entities in China therefore we get to see all data they store in the EU and the US.
The UK has Zero jurisdiction in Ireland for example where a lot of EU data may be stored.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754
The insane overreach was the UK wanting data on people not in the UK
Our noble "we can't have American data in the hands of our enemies," their savage "forcing American companies to turn over user data."
in other words, you store much more data on a phone versus a doomscrolling app[*]
*: unless you make videos and publish PII in them :)
I agree that the TikTok demands are pretty similar, though I might quibble over whether they're literally the same, since arrangements like that are the status quo in China but not in the US
Original comment below:
How is "remove foreign control of data on our nation's users" remotely the same as "give us access to foreign users' data"?
They're not even figuratively the same, despite you literally misusing that word
If by "give us access to foreign users' data", you mean TikTok, then ByteDance is only required to sell the US portion of TikTok to American buyers. If you mean iCloud, then Apple is only required to keep Chinese users' data on local servers.
"give us access to foreign users' data" referred to what the UK is asking for, I thought the post i was replying to was equating the UK's request to the US'
As a child of Portuguese revolution, I am aware of plenty of stories, apparently many folks nowadays think those are stories to scare misbehaved kids.
Those who are charged with stopping cyber crime are very must against this. End to End encryption is one of the better protections they can give you against foreign hackers and they want you to use it.
Meanwhile down the hall are people who are charged with investigating crimes someone in the country commits and they are want this. It is a lot easier to prove someone is involved in some crime if a warrant can get their data, but end to end encryption means they can only get random bytes. (of course they don't want warrants either, but that is a different issue not relevant here so they will specify warrants in this debate)
Note that this is not China apologia: they do the same brazen shit locally, but they're an authoritarian regime. I have lower expectations for human rights there.
George C. Parker was a conman in NYC who multiples times sold the ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge to his victims. Among other cons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig
The only way to prevent that is not having any local office, no employees, nothing. Sell physical objects only by the means of local 3rd party resellers which will import goods. Same thing for services. Of course they can ban imports and services or go after those 3rd parties. It depends how nasty they want to be.
By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
The US used a similar strategy decades ago to break Swiss Bank Secrecy laws (either Swiss banks had to give up the info or they were going to be kicked out of the US).
As someone else here said, Apple would 100% call this bluff. And you can be certain the UK won't have the US to put pressure on Apple for them. All the would happen is the UK Apple users would be with an expensive paperweight.
All evidence that I have seen suggests that consumers by and large do not care about this kind of privacy. They do not buy iPhones instead of other phones due to the privacy properties.
Therefore Apple's shareholders could order Apple to stay in the UK market.
And if not, then Apple's customers could be compensated with money and other UK-held assets that the government could confiscate.
You may be right, of course. But if there's one tech company who _might_ say "no", it's Apple.
Counterpoint: Apple in China.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/aapl/instituti...
To use poker terminology: I think that if the UK made this bet that Apple would call.
Then they can vote in a board of directors that agrees with them, and have that board fire Tim Cook.
I would hazard to guess that you'll see an exodus of a lot of folks leaving Apple either because (a) they won't follow that order, or (b) in solidarity with those that are fired.
Reminder that privacy is feature that Apple touts (how much you believe them is up to you):
> On January 28, 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered remarks at Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference: Enforcing Rights in a Changing World. The virtual conference — hosted annually in Brussels, Belgium — is one of the foremost international privacy and technology conferences bringing together leaders from academia, government, civil society and the private sector. Learn more about the features and controls Apple provides users to safeguard their privacy at http://www.apple.com/privacy
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaLxTz1Yw7M
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HjDpPnxcP0
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YOi0r3vptQ
Where does your thinking that they'll suddenly forget about revenue from UK over this come from?
* https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+china+revenues
* https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+uk+revenues
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/uk-spy-base-g...
This is not just a case of the British intelligence services secretly “tapping into” Irish telephonic and internet traffic via land and maritime cables. Rather in most cases they are being provided free (or commercial) access to the information by companies associated with the use, ownership or maintenance of these cables.
Post-Snowden the Irish government retroactively legalised it...
Basically by saying that if they don't comply, they can't do business in the UK.
So it's still a problem. This seems like a looming PR battle.
How so?
Though will Apple blink is still unknown. Just because they can doesn't mean they will.
If Apple really has the guts to stare this one down, then I would expect it's the government who blinks.
It says that by train it is about 90 minutes each way and would cost about the same as the car trip.
Not sure it would be worth it though, unless you are in Northern Ireland. If you are someplace more like London it would be a lot faster to go to the nearest Apple Store in France and a lot cheaper.
In the US.
Imagine Russian Oligarchs on android devices! Polonium will roll, I tell you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Note that it the bar is having the ability to access the server, so this law is completely incompatible with most GPDR solutions: It's illegal to store European user data and then refuse to hand it over to US law enforcement, regardless of whether the data is stored in Europe or the request breaks European law.
By the way, this is similar to why for true GDPR compliance, data centers should be operated by EU companies that aren't subsidiaries of US companies, because even if the latter operate data centers located in the EU, they would still be bound to secret orders by the US government.
Of course it wouldn’t be very profitable. So unfortunately you really can’t expect a major public company to take a stand like in a case like this.
Not so much because British people love their iPhones to such a extreme degree but because they willing to waste money and resources over something this stupid.
IMHO Apple could bring down the government that tried this if they really wanted to.
This is interesting, I know GDPR does not mandate data localization but I was under the impression that the requirements are a bit more difficult/stringent for transferring data out of the EU region ? While not perfect, it's a bit less 'open door' than it would be if it was hosted in the US.
The US has a law saying "If our spies tell American sysadmins to SSH into a server in the EU and copy data off it, they must do it and they must keep it secret"
You’d have to get a surprising number of people to go along with it.
If you think a SOC2 auditor would spot something like this, in a company the size of Apple or Google - you've probably never been through a SOC2 audit :)
And a heuristic anomaly detection system that generates masses of false alarms, and enough different teams and documents and policies to bury an army of SOC2 auditors. And so many log lines almost anything can get lost in the noise.
The janitors always have keys to everything. Especially when it’s required by law.
This all seems very similar to RIM and the aftermath of the riots in the UK. The backdoors became too obvious for customers to ignore. Did not go well for RIM in the market afterwards.
Is it though? I wonder how much of Apple's revenue is from the UK, probably around 5-6%? Apple isn't exactly as popular in the rest of the world as they are in the US.
Would damaging their privacy reputation globally be more valuable than the UK market? I honestly don't know, but my hunch says no - they are likely to want to keep their reputation and dump the UK market. I think more likely is Apple is going to be able to get the UK to cave in. Apple is extremely competent with PR, and would be able to spin any kind of pull-out or degraded service in the UK as the government's choice and fault, to the ire of UK citizens.
I mean this would be even more stupid than Partygate and the whole Truss debacle put together.
We know they collude with US intelligence serviceUS
Apple has no leg to stand on at all. When the NSA comes to your door and demands access to everything you have you don't get to say no. There is no court you can appeal to, and they'll take whatever they want and order you to keep your mouth shut about it. They'll walk right into your headquarters and data centers, force you to move your employees so they can set up an office for themselves on your property, insert their equipment into your network directly and take everything just like they did with AT&T decades ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)
Your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit) and I'm not even sure the US government would allow "shut down" as an option in some cases. It seems likely that they'd keep a massive target like Apple running even if the owners of the company wanted to cease operations, but lets be honest, Apple makes a lot of people very very rich so they'd never walk away from that. They'll keep making their money and just try to convince themselves that the US are the "good guys" and so it must be okay.
Obviously, Apple is going to comply with US federal law, given that their headquarters and employees are there, as well as their most profitable market. But when possible, they have shown themselves willing to fight against intrusion.
First, that's notably the FBI and not NSA. As gp says, NSA has greater powers with less legal oversight on national security grounds.
Second, a cynic might argue that Apple put up a noisy, principled fight that one time precisely to create the perception that you have here. It could be the FBI learned data requests to Apple are a dead end!
Or the two came to a mutually beneficial understanding: "don't come in the front door waving a court order for the cameras and we'll see what we can do when our reputation isn't on the line, see? And maybe if we help out, that antitrust investigation isn't necessary after all!"
A proposed law, or bill, like the one in the OP’s article, can be fought against.
Anything else is highly illogical or outright stupid, imagine CIA or NSA having meeting on this decade and a half ago and deciding 'well if they won't give us full access when we asked nicely I guess that's it, we have to respect the law and their wish'. LOL. They don't respect basic human rights at all if you don't hold US passport, and even then the list of cases breaking laws and constitution is endless.
Apple is good with their PR, but why do folks accept their every word literally and not as part of marketing spin to sell more services is beyond me. Rest of the market is not even trying to spin it that way which is actually more respectable behavior.
It’s been publicly used in a bunch of prosecutions at this point.
You're including end-to-end encrypted content in that as well, like from Advanced Data Protection?
> If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data – including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more – is protected using end-to-end encryption. No one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple, and this data remains secure even in the case of a data breach in the cloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756
I have no opinion on whether US intel has a backdoor into this e2e encryption or not. It seems like the sort of thing where people non-chalantly state that it must happen, but of course no one ever has actual proof or a source.
Can you give an example then? It would be major hacker news news if supposedly E2EE iCloud data were used in a prosecution.
Being willing to sacrifice everything you have, including your career, your freedom, and potentially your life, just to let the public know the truth is not something you should expect people to do. It's a huge amount of risk and sacrifice while the only reward is knowing that you've done the right thing even though you'll be vilified and punished for it. That's what makes whistleblowers heroes.
Snowden left an example of what kind of lifestyle is possible after leaking, and I doubt snowflakes at FAANG would be down for that. Or how about other examples of leakers that have turned up dead? That's a cheery thought to consider.
So yeah, at this point in time, I do believe there's a lot of people that might not agree, but are not up for the task.
I am actually surprised she survived this and wasnt suicided or sent to Guantanamo for water boarding till heart stops, I guess thats only for those without US passports.
https://youtu.be/eW-OMR-iWOE
I am not a lawyer, but I think that this would be illegal under EU privacy law.
As far as I can tell, China is asking to keep Chinese data in China and have access to it, but it is not asking to access data of American or European citizen and if it did we would be pissed off.
Frankly, the arrogance is appalling.
I suppose this is _good_ but more competent and well funded groups out of Israel, Israeli military complex, Cyprus don’t need to “ask” for a back door.
Honest question, how Apple is doing it in China? Maybe the exact same scheme will work for UK.
No, that does not suggest none exists, it only says they don’t have access to it. They could have chosen or have been ordered to give the keys to the government agency but not keep one themselves. I’m not saying that’s likely, just that it’s important to not take these statements as saying more than they do. They wouldn’t hesitate to use “technically correct” as a defence and you have to take that into account.
The UK has reportedly served Apple a document called a technical capability notice. It’s a criminal offense to even reveal that the government has made a demand. Similarly, if Apple did cede to the UK’s demands then it apparently would not be allowed to warn users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
Kinda depends on judicial interpretations of free speech, but that's how warrant canaries work. Are warrant canaries legal in the UK? They seem to be in the US but idk how well established that is.
Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post that "[p]ersonally, I have never believed [warrant canaries] would work. It relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking doesn't prevent someone from not speaking. But courts generally aren't impressed by this sort of thing, and I can easily imagine a secret warrant that includes a prohibition against triggering the warrant canary.
Lots of similar discussion on HN already, e.g. in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5871541.
It’s like if you conspired with your brother to steal from the cookie jar. He stole the cookies while you distracted your parents. Later on your mother reports to your father:
> When asked whether they stole from the cookie jar, derbOac did not provide a direct answer but suggested they didn’t didn’t know who did it: "I did not see anyone removing cookies from the jar," they stated.
Your statement is factually correct, but it doesn’t say what your mother concluded.
So I think a journalist asking an organization like Google if they've been asked isn't really informative, because they almost certainly have been.
I'm not sure how it's relevant other than to say an answer from Google's response might seem oblique, but they're also being asked obliquely and that colors how you might interpret their response.
If the backdoor was exploited by a criminal though?
For example (a simplistic one), you can have a statement like "we do not have any backdoors in our software" added to your legal documents (TOS, etc). But once a backdoor is added, you are compelled by your lawyers to remove that statement. So you aren't disclosing that you have added a backdoor. You're just updating your legal documents to make accurate claims.
By putting statements like what you're proposing in your TOS or marketing material you are potentially setting yourself up for a situation where it's now impossible to comply with all applicable laws. As others have mentioned, Australia passed legislation preventing you from disclosing the existence or non-existence of specific legal documents; they're at least warning you up front that the canary itself is illegal. The solution is to not make marketing statements that would become fraudulent in a situation where you can't legally retract them, unfortunately.
Edit: since lawyers are mentioned here... if the lawyer who is telling you that you need to remove the line from the TOS is the same lawyer who told you it was ok to put the line in the TOS... you should probably find a new lawyer because they didn't think through the consequences of approving it in the first place.
One would think this runs afoul of other laws though, truth in advertising and similar.
Its such a legal minefield, and the UKs request borders on violating the sovereignty of other nations I can't see Apple complying, but maybe that's hopium talking.
The whole definition of "end-to-end encrypted" is that only the two ends have the keys. If anyone or anything other than the two ends (the one sending and the one receiving) has access to the keys, it's not end-to-end encrypted.
And when their key leaks, it’s as good as no encryption, but still end-to-end encrypted.
It doesn't stop being end-to-end when you add another end. We often do group chats that way.
Or you can create a side-channel and send al the data there. That would stop it from being end-to-end.
No, they would have had custody of the keys. Meaning it would still be true they cannot (now) access the data.
The last time I wrote to my MP, I got a form letter back basically saying "Don't bother contacting us, only The Party matters". (I mean, those weren't the words at all; but having had lame-but-bespoke messages back from them in the past, this was a noticeable and disheartening change).
I’m not sure how accountability for the justice service would increase by adding more politics into the mix.
If law enforcement won't catch criminal even if you had them all the details, evidence, witnesses, then average person thinks there laws are dead anyway as there is no one competent to enforce them.
I can educate people but it always comes back to "I've not got anything to hide". What are we suppose to do, go out to the streets and protest? Start a petition, right to a PM who has no idea what encryption is?
Mentioning Linux to my family opens a can of worms. We are naive to think protesting actually changes something, it's old fashion. Those with power just don't care so unless people attack with their wallets nothing will come from.
It's not 1995 so unless you have £ for lobbying surrounded by people in suites there is nothing public of any nation can do against anyone in power.
I've not given up, I just don't follow outdated methods of means to take back power. I use my wallet, I don't shop at amazon.
Stop being a consumer and supporting a ego who supports the wars, causes your protesting against. That would be the next greatest thing but we are too convenienced by these services.
Contradiction much? One where we would rather go and protest, head home and then go and support companies that do the opposite of what your fighting for. That is why protests are flawed. I'd rather be out on a Saturday picking up litter (like I do) than be at a protest and that's not just because I don't support the cause.
I just see the it as a old-fashioned method that doesn't apply to today’s new powers. You can't fight for power and then oppositely go and do the opposite nor can you fight when the power is to corrupt. Level the playing field is all you can do.
Innovate, create and throw it back in their faces and don't sell out when the FANG bites you with your cheque.
> Collective action does work and always will, but it needs to be coordinated.
Of course, but who wants to coordinate it. Why not yourself, adding to who wants to be put on a hit list? I get executed and then what, It all goes back to how it was. The Boeing whistleblowers ended up dead, any recourse from that?
I'm being realistic, in the capitalist world we live in unless you have assets, power your worth nothing.
You have no voice, no power, ever. Where's the futuristic project that saves the world? I'm sure the next JavaScript library posted on the front page of HN will be it.
I hate to be "woke" and break it to you that in this reality that your just a schmuck to an entity who's paying you to ensure that your powering their machine with bare benefits; if your lucky. Many homeless folk out there.
Heck, if you've got a job after this ML/AI fluff, you must be good at it. I'm 35 and above cynical at this point, I see no hope in this world from both people and those who run the show.
Take it as you wish, I wouldn't hold it against mother earth imploding herself because of the vile the homo sapiens race has become. Anyway, back to our designated cubicles within the walled gardens we opted for.
Describe a better (on average) world and let's try it.
A fine to a $multinational company isn't punishment. Strip their assets from.
More respect for one another would uphold so much more positivity in this world, but no we must judge and align folk in to groups. We are still divided by diversity. It's 2025 and we still have issues over someone being black, white or in-between.
But in this day and age capitalism has gotten so rootless that nothing is done when the power in question abuses their power. There is no respect in today’s capitalism, upgrade respect and you'll have upgraded capitalism. we only go to war because of lack of respect.
Turn the page of the plastic age. I'm now rate limited so that's my digital protesting done for today. Not that anyone has taken side and protested with but would rather point how my ideology is wrong and not contributing to what they would do. But I'm sure you'll be buying your pickets off amazon and walking around town with them only to be tossed aside after the rally this Saturday for them to do something comfy either whether it being Netflix, gaming or porn.
But that's okay it's why I do litter picking out of civil respect; not enough. That way I can pick up the crap that people think they are fighting for as my power of fighting back. When you do go for a smoke, throw the butt on the street, spit on the pavement I'll be there scrubbing that too. Where's the respect? But, hey. People suck we know this. Companies suck more.
Can you threaten class-action lawsuits? If so: Donald, Elon, Jeff, America, UK, Israel, Russia, Microsoft, Google, Apple; you name it. If $entity has treated the world with hurt, you have no respect. Is that what you want to hear? Because that's true capitalism.
Sugar coated? Close your eyes and turn on the TV; especially the news. Pick a side and enjoy the slaughter. You'll be dead soon.
Turn the page of the plastic age? We all live in a plastic age. Everything is plastic your phone is too. Wars are plastic. Plastic is OLD. Turn the page.
Is this a problem?
Most day to day complaints are they don't prosecute enough, often related to the bastard that snatched your phone. We have approximately zero people sitting in jail for failing to decrypt and similar.
>This is a very obvious setup for future totalitarianism.
No it really isn't. If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writing books like 1984 and bombing nazis.
> Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad.
Perhaps often they've done something bad, but sometimes they haven't, that's the point. Obviously this is wrong and you shouldn't be so passive about it.
> If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writing books like 1984 and bombing nazis.
I'd argue people in the UK today like to adopt the label of being anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarian, but in reality most people here, including our politicians, quite like authoritarianism.
For example, people here often argue things like "I support free speech, but obviously insulting someone for their identity is wrong". So in the UK we apparently have free speech and I can apparently criticise religious people, but at the same time just this week someone in the UK was arrested for burning a bible.
You see this hypocrisy constantly in the UK... "I'm not an authoritarian, but smoking is bad". "I'm not an authoritarian, but you can't be saying that". "I'm not an authoritarian, but if you're worried about mass surveillance you probably have something to hide". "I"m not authoritarian, but you can't just let people have private data on an encrypted device which the government can't access".
The UK is very authoritarian these days, but unlike other parts of the world people here deny it while arguing in favour of more of it.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with being authoritarian and wanting the government to have more control either. Clearly many countries find this type of government appealing, but lets at least be honest about it. We don't want kids on social media. We don't want people smoking. We don't want people being about to call people names on Twitter. We don't want people burning religious texts. We don't want people being free from government surveillance.
This way is more serene and orderly than anarchy. But I suppose it bodes poorly for the individual liberties. On balance, there is value in aligning and orchestrating society. Too much individualism can turn into radicalisation through identity politics, as we’ve seen in the US in the last decade.
A large degree of societal cohesion is not all bad, in the context of the alternative. It’s not all good either, but it has served the British thus far. It’s serving some other countries like China, too, one can’t deny it.
The thing about giving your rights away is that it’s very difficult to get them back, and you never know who “they” are going to be in the future.
We did rebel over ID cards. Passed in 2006, repealed in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
* I have nothing to hide, I don't care
* Oh come on, our government doesn't care what I'm up to
* The UK will never be totalitarian. I'm not scared of the government
* The UK civil service is incompetent and could never pull this off (fair point, although I worry about the safety of my personal data in the hands of such people)
Let's not forget we had a hard-left (Corbyn) socialist regime come close to power, whose cabinet members called for "direct action" against political opponents, just a few years ago.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/watch-john-mcdonnell-s-c...
I don't think people realise how quickly things could go wrong with these surveillance mechanisms in place, and spiteful, authoritarian politicians taking power.
Or spiteful, authoritarian non-politicians taking power, spreading misinformation, and censoring free speech:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/musk-shows-us-what-actua...
His job is to reduce the size and power of government.
Authoritarians don’t do that. Libertarians do that. Two opposite ends of the spectrum.
“Misinformation” is a very subjective word, so I’m afraid you and I will have to agree to disagree that Musk is spreading misinformation.
Don’t believe everything you read about Musk in the mainstream media. Don’t forget that the media have a vested interest in denigrating Musk, because he’s their most significant competitor, and while X exists, and we’re able to hear directly from influential people, the legacy media is powerless to control the narrative.
What, your claim is that libertarians suppress speech? Explain why Musk is censoring speech on Twitter.
Musk is authoritarian by nature. He always has been.
> “Misinformation” is a very subjective word
It isn't. It's lies, falsehoods, and untruths. Here are some of the lies Musk has spread:
- Lies about Paul Pelosi: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelos...
- Lies about the recent LA fires: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/10/elon-mu...
- Lies about USAID: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250202-musk-brands-u...
- Lies about how good he is at video games: https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-01-24/elon-musk-a...
And so on and so on. He never stops lying. He can't help himself. There's something wrong with him.
> Don’t forget that the media have a vested interest in denigrating Musk, because he’s their most significant competitor, and while X exists, and we’re able to hear directly from influential people, the legacy media is powerless to control the narrative.
This kind of conspiratorial thinking won't get you anywhere.
Carl Sagan worried this would happen to you (https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...). Sagan said, "I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness"
And, sure enough, it has.
Many outlets have reported on Musk's LA fires lies. Pick the one you like. Here are some:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhyatt/2025/01/29/musks-x-pl...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/los-angeles-fire...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/los-angele...
https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-deletes-tweet-agreei...
https://www.wired.com/story/maga-blaming-dei-california-wild...
Alex Jones loved getting the endorsement from Musk.
In 2023 there were terrible wildfires in Greece. The media immediately jumped on it and claimed climate change was responsible. Anyone who questioned the narrative was a "climate change denier" or "conspiracy theorist"
Then, later on, we discovered there had been 79 arrests for arson. Obviously, the media barely covered this. Only on free speech platforms like X was the truth revealed, and now, it is also documented on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Greece_wildfires
Today's "conspiracy theory" often turns out to be tomorrow's fact - so don't be so quick to judge Musk. He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do, given he runs a large network of hundreds of millions of users.
Why is Musk suppressing free speech on X: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/musk-shows-us-what-actua...
> so don't be so quick to judge Musk.
He's got over a decade's worth of lies behind him now. When someone is of such weak character that they feel the need to lie about being good at video games then there's not much more to say.
> He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do
He doesn't. He endorses conspiracy theories.
Carl Sagan was right. You're no longer able to distinguish between what feels good and what's true.
In most cases it requires a court order as well.
Do you have a source for that assertion?
s3 makes it clear that if you plausibly claim you have forgotten it, then the prosecution must prove this is not the case (i.e. you still know it) beyond reasonable doubt.
As mentioned in the article, Salt Typhoon and the recency of this request by the UK. At this point they should know better.
My pet theory is anytime the US wants to do something illegal under US law, they simply ask the UK to do it and vice versa. That's why Salt Typhoon isn't and never will be a lesson learned.
[1] Susan Landau and Alan Rozenshtein Debate End-to-End Encryption (Again!) https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-daily--susan-la...!)
Black CIA sites weren't legal either, nor was torture.
What proof? You would think after all the leaks there have been, some proof would exist. Instead, you cling to a conspiracy theory based on a misunderstanding of an agreement.
They're all conspiracy theorists when the government is accused of wrongdoing and the "proof" demands and moving goalposts happen all the time. Helped by the lack of transparency and all encompassing powers of agencies and governments.
Your arguments boil down to repeating narratives and things like "X is illegal so it doesn't happen" which just shows how naivety is part of your bad argument repertoire. I'm sure black CIA sites and coup d'etats didn't happen if I can't prove them to your liking... And if I somehow satisfied you, there's some justification that make them lawful and correct.
Give me a break.
If the Five Eyes participants worked as you have stated instead of as the leaked agreement documents say they work, you would expect Snowden to leak that first because it is obviously illegal. He did not. Why not reduce the number of people required to keep quiet in the conspiracy by having the US spy directly on its citizens? Every question you might ask about your conspiracy theory makes it sound even more ridiculous if you bother to ask it.
As such you demonstrate that you will not be an ally in case of a surge of unethical behavior.
The point isn’t for nazis to defend themselves - it is to defeat them while you can.
> The point ... is to defeat them while you can.
That can be your point, and with that framing almost anything is permissible! My point is generally to let free, open democracy run its course without putting our fingers on the scale too much.
I'm not scared of people doing a salute in the style of a movement that's been dead for almost a century. I'm not scared of communists flags or chants, or people chanting from the river to the sea. I think it's all healthy as long as it's non violent. The argument that it leads to violence is not logically sound and very minority reportesque.
That a nazi salute, corroborated with converging political views…? You obviously don’t understand, don’t see how things happen.
Or you do, and you know downplaying “nazi wannabees” is part of the game.
It’s not about being scared but principled: an open democracy does not tolerate ideas going against its very foundations: it makes sure these are, expressed maybe, but kept in a very strict perimeter which they ought no get out from.
After WW2 there was a period of strong Jewish support for nazi rights. Were they not an open democracy? Is the risk in 2025 stronger than what they faced?
I don't know really, is it that every era needs a boogeyman or is it just that we are on a grand cycle away from liberality? Both maybe?
But as soon as they associate their "thing" to a violent/segregationist personality/behaviour, you can be certain that they are banned, and in no gentle manners.
Wow, I don't know either. Saying nazis could be sort of boogeyman or victims?... that tolerating nazis would be liberal? Wow. Sounds like a line from "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies".
You seem not to understand how a society works or what liberal even means... A liberal cannot tolerate ideas that are explicitly against tolerance, as those lead to illiberal behaviours. The best illustration of it is the actual suppression of speech that is happening in the USA, by the very people that reclaimed freedom of speech.
Or again, you do know.
Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent, asking the ones reacting to that violence to accept it as it is. Not too good looking.
Thanks I'll check it out.
> Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent
I think I understand where you're coming from but I would instead state it as supporting first amendment style laws for my country, warts and all.
Would you argue that the first amendment should be annulled?
because you have an absolute free speech, you also expose yourself to the absolute consequences of what you say, or do.
Exposing oneself as a nazi exposes one to consequences.
Once, not that long ago, your country was proud of kicking nazis dead, for good reasons (albeit a bit hypocritical too when one reads history).
Participants spy on each other's citizens on the other's behalf and share data, to avoid the legality of doing so to their own citizens.
edit: typo
Overall i agree with you, it is really disheartening. That being said, i've made progress with my family on valuing privacy and the dangers of surveillance. I think people might be changing their minds slowly but still lots of work to do.
A breakthrough with my sisters was when abortion was threatened here in the states. Mentioned to them that it would be easy for authorities to enforce abortion punishments by subpoenaing data from menstruation cycle tracker apps. This kind of "clicked" for them and they became more open to the other parts (not given ratukan or whatever their purchase history, etc. etc.)
Now let’s say that some Republican Senators and Representatives were ethically opposed to but then threatened to be primaried and President Musk said he would throw all of his money behind a potential opponent, how long do you think it would take a law to be passed?
Even without a law, we already see that Cook will willingly bend a knee to Trump as will Google.
Right now in my home state the governor was trying to get a law passed banning Western Union from allowing illegal immigrants from sending money overseas.
He will just do an executive order. He is an authoritarian, basically a king. "But but but it's illegal". The system can't keep up with speed he is dismantling it.
And the only implication that they exist is about them seeing publicity campaigns of senators.
I think we are perhaps the lowest point ever in terms of anti-surveillance efforts. There seems to be bipartisan effort among many (most?) western governments that the government should have unfettered access to all data, regardless of any reasonable expectation of privacy.
Encryption seems barely tolerated these days. Governments are insisting on backdoors, they are making it illegal in some cases for companies to even discuss what is going on or that monitoring is happening.
We barely know what is going on with the programs and efforts that get leaked to the media, much less the programs that operate in total secret.
If you voted for this Tory-lite government, then you can stop voting for any future Tory-lite governments. If you did not, there's not much you can do in practice without devoting your life to it.
The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson (appointed by the Labour Attorney General), warned against "publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So, if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense [incitement to racial hatred]."
He added further, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."
This isn’t “Tory-lite,” this is Labour.
Sources: https://freespeechunion.org/labours-war-on-free-speech/
https://x.com/skynews/status/1821178852397477984?s=46
I'm a bit confused though, surely if I call someone "Hitler-lite" this couldn't possibly be inteprered as something positive, haha. Maybe it's just tribalist reflexes, or maybe I did word things strangely.
For some reason Americans, including Musk, go all partisan and feel the need to blame speech restriction on the lefty party but it's not what happened.
I'll skip the same extreme partisan rant, but replacing Musk with Soros or whoever.
This is Hobson's choice as far as I can see.
I don't think there's anyone you could currently vote for that wouldn't do this.
He was unelectable for a variety of reasons.
Here’s three:
Wanting to pull out of NATO and instead appease Putin.
Lying about being forced to sit on the floor of what was later shown to be an empty train.
Basically doing nothing during the Brexit fiasco.
He was just gaff after gaff.
If you agree that Brexit happened under the Tories and not Labour, then we can also agree that THIS order is happening under the newly elected "Labour Party" and not the "Tories", or so-called "Tory-lite" names.
It's completely pointless trying to remove accountability of this government's illogical actions and then to immediately resort to blaming the previous government for bad decisions like this one.
Just admit that this is under the Labour government.
You have to change the view of the country as a whole, and for generations the U.K. has been a country of curtain twitchers.
I hope it never reaches the above level, but always remember that remains an option.
Weren’t the few JSO protestors who were jailed convicted of doing things that would be objectively illegal in more or less any country? Where are the countries that allow me to deface priceless works of art or block public highways without any legal consequences? I am not saying that these are necessarily illegitimate forms of protest, but they come under the heading of ‘civil disobedience’. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you get punished and thereby draw attention to your cause. Even in the US you can easily be jailed for protests involving blockading or trespassing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69003240.amp, https://www.vpm.org/news/2024-06-24/gaza-protest-interstate-...
It may well be that the new legislation is overly broad, but I don’t think the JSO protests are a great example of this.
This is what the parent comment is getting at when they say "Tory-lite".
(I very much agree with the sentiment...)
(Hint: It certainly isn't Tory.)
It's also one of the reasons why I will never vote Labour as long as I live.
Same thing happens in many other countries no matter how strongly HN users want to tell you A is literally hitler and B is great.
What lead to to believe that? The Conservatives and Conservative-Continuity governments both agree that our data simply must be in the hands of the police, DEFRA, and your local council.
RIPA will never be repealed and only strengthened.
Change what you can, I say, VPN on the network device.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...
> When Oliver shows Snowden evidence that all typical Americans care about is whether the government can see our "dick pics," he encourages Snowden to go through a list of every government surveillance program and explain its capabilities in terms of access to "dick pics."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228359
It's always through the appearance of good intentions and a public that pushes for whatever narrative they're fed that they normalize this.
People love and want more of this, not less.
And stop making excuses for parties that don't (i.e. Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives).
At the moment, the UK public (and media) considers it a sport to disparage and smear parties like Reform, whose leaders want to shrink the power and over-reach of the state.
We are so concerned with appearing virtuous and internationally generous, we cannot be seen to align with a party that wants to put UK citizens first (border security? deporting dangerous criminals back to their home nation? gasp, how could we be so ghastly!)
This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
The problem is that there are none.
The correct assessment of all these political parties is that by default, they all cannot be trusted. Especially both labour and the conservatives.
> This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
Yes. The second problem is that the United Kingdom is incapable to changing itself historically and is fundamentally destined to never be open to change.
Just old people making bad laws about stuff they don't understand - or are straight up citizen hostile, sometimes hard to tell which it is.
Sadly, the EU is trying very hard and very persistently to pass the Chat Control bill. So far the EU hasn't succeeded, but I would be surprised if EU politicians didn't keep trying until it is finally codified into law.
(disclosure: brit)
The UK population generally wants to put their fingers in their ears and pretend everything is ok. Remember we're all descended from people who didn't go to the colonies to try to get a better life.
I was wondering whether this is about Advanced Data Protection, which encrypts almost all data end-to-end on iCloud. It’s only later in this report that it gets into this key detail:
> At issue is cloud storage that only the user, not Apple, can unlock. Apple started rolling out the option, which it calls Advanced Data Protection, in 2022.
Before stating this, the article says:
> Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said.
This means Apple would be prevented from providing Advanced Data Protection to users in the U.K.
Not making Advanced Data Protection available is made worse by this requirement:
> One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security.
Apple can appeal, but is forced to comply meanwhile (until the appeal is heard) anyway:
> Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.
I think they could do something like what Tik Tok did, by letting users know why they can no longer provide the service.
I would personally give Apple money to see them actually stand-up to this. What's probably more concerning is the number of companies not complaining about this at all.
This headline comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_(headlin...
I don't see UK judges getting motivated to rule in favour of a foreign company because they took their ball and went home, not even in cases where the ball happens to be very popular.
Governments are extremely powerful. They may issue a gag order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order) that makes it illegal for Apple to do that.
If push comes to shove and apple actually called their bluff and withdrew completely from the UK market, I'd bet that that government would become so unpopular that they would not be elected again for quite some time.
Seems absurdist. They have to implement the backdoor, appeal, and only if the appeal is successful can they disable it.
Here in Spain no person has even tried to SMS me (which is the fallback for iMessage which I don't have) for 6 years or so :). I also don't have RCS enabled. It's all WhatsApp and Telegram.
The SE is also relatively expensive in Europe. And in Spain Apple seems to have completely removed all trace of the SE from their website. Strange enough. Didn't check other EU sites.
If your MP has an office in their constituency? They rent the office and buy all the computers and desks and printers and whatnot out of their own pocket, and get the expenses reimbursed later on.
The separation between work life and professional life is also extremely blurry. After all, you have to build up a network of supporters and donors and people in the party who like you before you can get elected. So hundreds of your best supporters and closest allies already have your personal number saved against your name in their phone.
I think they do not have MDM.
Unlikely. That's illegal.
I believe we should increasingly turn to steganography as a way to ensure our privacy (obviously, combined with encryption). Something that provides simple plausible deniability but lots of data to use as a carrying medium should become the default selection (like "personal videos" — a great use for our phone cameras to build an extensive collection), so even if "identified" as potential carrier for the data, it would be impossible to convict someone over it.
I can imagine a scheme where your secret passphrase defines what bits of data in a video to use to carry actual data and yet avoid changing the output too much. Obviously, coming with a non-reversible algorithm that takes into account different lossy video encoding schemes is non-trivial, though I am sure there is some (plenty?) prior art to build off of.
"Plausible deniability" is cute, but in practice, who cares?
> impossible to convict someone over it.
Yeah, sure, tell me how well that works for you. "Your honor, the data is mathematically indistinguishable from random bytes so you can't convict me" -> "The witness saw you type in a password to view data from that image, give us the password or you're going to prison. Even if you don't give us the passphrase, the police officer says you might be using something called 'steganography', and that's already enough to convict you"
The court and legal system does not care about clever logical tricks or cryptographic tricks or any of that.
But when you haven't (eg. if you had your data that way in an Apple Cloud, and Apple was required to provide blanket access to everything), nobody can come and claim you've got there anything other than videos.
Obviously, a sufficiently motivated actor won't be stopped (see torture), but your data is not out in the open.
The problem with just doing encryption is that it can be made illegal and it's obvious when you are using it with a cloud platform. The same is true for steganography (you can make it illegal), but someone would have to know you are using it to apply the same tactic.
Unless you know for a fact someone is using hidden communication its near impossible to discern in the wild.
Not only that, but also trying to ban platforms that don't follow their censorship guidelines (TikTok in the US, X under scrutiny in UE) and even voiding elections when the result is not good (Romania) under very slim technology-related pretense (somehow a few ads are deemed enough to cancel an election, but 24/7 oriented news from every established newspapers in another country like France is totally OK). It's becoming harder and harder to believe in said democracy when the methods are all but looking like the ones used in non-democracies.
Downvoting for this claim. Stop spreading misinformation.
1) it wasn't the government voiding the election, it was the courts
2) it wasn't because they disagreed with the results, it was because an existing law was broken (undisclosed campaign financing)
Yes. Democracies around the world are increasingly stopping being democracies.
No. I want all of my data end-to-end encrypted. In transit, at rest, everywhere and at all times. Privacy is a human right. Security of their citizens is what these governments vowed to protect. If they can't, these governments should be changed.
This protects you even if we — as citizens — fail to stop governments from going rogue and forbidding encryption (some of us remember US export controls on strong encryption that was only lifted 2 decades or so ago).
In the US, after Salt Typhoon compromised telecom networks—including court-authorized wiretap systems—the FBI has now (somewhat reluctantly, I think) started advising government officials to use end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp to protect themselves. [1]
I think the UK government is running a bit behind wrt Encryption.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/17/nx-s1-5223490/text-messaging-...
It's bad. It's one of the causes that triggered the French Rebellion in 1793: one rule for them, one for us?
But the counter-argument here is: if the civilian E2E apps had also/already been backdoored, they'd be entirely out of options now.
> So much for personal liberties. I'd like to give Labour the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a holdover from the last government knowing how fast the civil service actually works but given the Tory 3.0 plan they are going with I wouldn't put it passed them.
>We didn't vote for this.
You very much did vote for this, you voted for Labour under Keir Starmer and he did not particularly hide his being tory-lite. If one is surprised by this they must not have paid any attention before voting.
Labour was behind:
they are as bad, if not worse than the toriesThe US may suck every now and then, but the US constitution is one of the best things in human history. It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
This is not true, both because it’s not the only one[1], and because the constitution hasn’t prevented state censorship in the US[2-4].
> It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
How would it do that? The US constitution has no power over the UK.
[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
[2]: https://journals.ala.org/index.php/jifp/article/view/7208/10...
[3]: https://historycollection.com/10-situations-in-history-when-...
[4]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Sta...
That the constitution hasn't been upheld to a perfect standard all the time doesn't mean it doesn't codify freedoms. Also, precisely what the standard is isn't universally agreed upon and changes over time.
Freedom being “codified” doesn’t mean much when it’s trivial to violate it both directly and indirectly.
> What the standard is isn’t universally agreed upon.
The First Amendment is very explicit about what the standard is: “[…] or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The government has many tools to violate precisely those rights, and both sides of the political spectrum have exercised them.
The society and political environment that created the Constitution are far in the past, and we should stop pretending that modern US shares its spirit. Instead, we should look around to learn from the success of other countries.
Without men and women willing to stand by it and defend it, it is useless. And what we are seeing is that there are increasing number of people who have taken an oath to defend the constitution but have chosen not to do so.
History is full of cases where a well written constitution is ignored by the ruling government.
No, its not. Plenty of other countries have written constitutions with codified rights against the government. Many of them are more explicit about how the conflict between explicit grants of power to the government and explicit rights of the people balance in conflict, which may make them seem superficially less strong; OTOH, the fact that the US Constitution has both unqualified grants of power and unqualified enumerated rights has led to that conflict being resolved by the courts, by...qualifying the rights based in large part on the grants of power.
> Every other country has rights given by the government to their citizens.
That's no more true of “every other country” than it is of the US. The Constitution itself is a deal negotiated between representatives of and ratified by state governments, so all of the rights it protects are, ipso facto, granted by government.
For example, in the Dutch constitution, freedom of speech, religion, privacy et cetera are all qualified “except as restricted by law.” [0] That is to say: if the government passes a law restricting your speech, religion or privacy, that will typically be Constitutionally acceptable. Meanwhile, in the US, the Constitution is absolute, to rather extreme ends. The Dutch constitution is of course rather obvious in its weaknesses, but there are other signs for other countries aside from the text itself. One good method is to take a look at the mechanisms of enforcement of the Constitution and measures of Constitutionality. For a good laugh: https://www.advocatie.nl/nieuws/rechter-mag-wetten-langs-de-...
[0] https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2023-02-22 For example: “Ieder heeft, behoudens bij of krachtens de wet te stellen beperkingen, recht op onaantastbaarheid van zijn lichaam.” or “Everyone has, subject to restrictions under the law, the right to inviolability of his body.” Most other rights include such a provision.
What exactly constitutes "hard to change"? In many countries, fundamental freedoms are regular legislation which can be overturned in the usual manner. Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
This can go either way. If you can agree 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on an amendment, you can successfully ratify it (via convention if needed if Congress isn't amenable). But 3/4 of state legislatures can represent small states - so much so that it's possible to amend the US Constitution though legislatures that are nominally representing less than 25% of the country (and in practice even less than that when you consider the effects of FPTP).
For example, Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz) was created after World War II to ensure the protection of human rights, including freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, among others. In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Constitution Act of 1982 and guarantees a range of civil liberties. India's Constitution, too, contains an extensive list of fundamental rights that are designed to restrict arbitrary government action, such as the rights to equality, freedom of expression, and personal liberty. South Africa's Constitution is also highly regarded for its strong emphasis on human rights protections.
Even in the United Kingdom, where there is no single written constitution in the US sense, many rights are protected by statutes (such as the Human Rights Act 1998) and established common law principles that limit government power.
Many democracies enshrine rights in law, reflecting the widely accepted idea that such rights are inherent and must be protected against undue governmental interference, rather than merely being granted as privileges.
I would like to point out Section 1 of the Charter:
> 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
There is a ton of complexity to determining whether or not Charter violations by the government will actually have any kind of consequential remedy for those whose rights have been violated. None of the rights or freedoms in it are strictly absolute and there's legislation that infringes on many of them with those infringements held as "reasonable" by the courts.
The next 4 years will certainly prove or disprove this statement!
It certainly wasn’t intended for the currently used purpose and will very much come down to “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which anyone short of the best legal scholars in our country aren’t qualified to speak to.
The Supreme Court already ruled on the meaning of the amendment in 1898, so there's no possible ambiguity left.
Trump's executive order is just blatantly illegal.
"Chinese persons, born out of the United States, remaining subjects of the Emperor of China, and not having become citizens of the United States, are entitled to the protection of, and owe allegiance to, the United States so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here, and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the same sense as all other aliens residing in the United States. . . ."
You'll note the "so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here" part. His parents weren't illegal immigrants. They were 'legally domiciled,' which was a thing at the time. Again, from my understanding it gets more in the weeds than that.
The section you're quoting is a recapitulation of the facts of the case, as agreed upon by all parties. The majority then lays out its legal theory and applies them to the facts, not all of which are relevant to the decision.
The court argues at length that under English Common Law (which is also the law of the United States), anyone born in the country is automatically a citizen, with only two exceptions:
1. Children of accredited diplomats.
2. Children born to hostile foreign armies in belligerent occupation of some part of the country's territory. For example, it cites the case of a child born to the wife of a British soldier during the British occupation of Charleston, during the revolution. That child is not an American citizen.
The court only recognizes one further exception to birthright citizenship:
3. Children born under the jurisdiction of Native American tribes. The court says that the existence of quasi-independent native tribes is a special circumstance with no precedent in English Common Law.
The court specifically argues that English Common Law and the text of the 14th Amendment allow no other exceptions. The concept of "legal domicile" is not relevant to citizenship, and the court specifically states that even the children of sojourners, businesspeople and others only temporarily in the country become citizens at birth. The only exceptions are those I listed above.
The point is that you have to actually read the majority opinion, which argues all of these points at great length.
What Trump is trying to push through, by executive order, would be a massive revision of American law, going back to the Constitution and even before the revolution. The 14th Amendment was intended to make those principles, which Trump is now denying, completely unassailable for all time.
I'm not even going to get into all the other unconstitutional actions Trump has taken, such as appointing Elon Musk to lead the most powerful agency in the federal government without Senate advice and consent.
You mean this senate? Many of them are not happy with the national debt and are willing to take risks if it gets fixed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA3ma1MeSIU
Senate consent is only required for actual agency posts. Elon's team is just a small part of the USDS which is part of the Office of the White House. Which doesn't require Senate consent. Elon also has a Top Secret clearance and is technically competent to do the job.
Now I'm not defending everything Elon does but I'm saying that I didn't see anything that looked illegal there about the job description and the hiring itself.
Personally, I'd be happy enough if they just gutted just the FDA. There's probably a lot of other agencies doing harm and are overfunded.
Also, was advice and consent from the senate obtained for all these billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and given to other countries for things that aren't needed?
The Constitution requires Senate advice and consent for all government officials, except minor officials specifically exempted by an act of Congress. Calling Elon Musk and DOGE "just a small part of the USDS" is laughable. You know that isn't true. They have the power to take over and shut down any federal agency they choose. He's not some minor official, and the Constitution is very clear that his position needs Senate approval.
> I didn't see anything that looked illegal there
Shutting down USAID is illegal. The president does not have the authority to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies and to not spend money that Congress has appropriated.
> was advice and consent from the senate obtained for all these billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and given to other countries
Yes. Why are you even asking this?
> for things that aren't needed?
AIDS patients in Africa don't need antiviral drugs?
It's a worthwhile read for anyone.
We elect our politicians. We demand they stop serious crime and terrorism. When they have bad ideas about how to do that, we let them know that it's a bad idea. Or we don't elect them again. This works.
Think so? Perhaps on the surface. Think Yes Minister and Sir Humphrey. No matter how well meaning politicians are they'll be screwed rotten by determined public sector employees and then they'll be finished off by powerful corporate interests, citizens haven't a chance.
What's more you the citizen will likely be the last to know about it. Yes, outwardly all will seem normal as that's the plan but it's only a chimera—appearance is everything. Those in control learned that trick from Vespasian, it has a long lineage of working well.
Can't you see the Investigatory Powers Act wasn't dreamt up by politicans but by nameless but very powerful gnomes in GCHQ, MI6, etc., etc? For starters, politicians wouldn't have had the brains to concoct an Orwellian act on a scale like that on their own. (I've spent too long working in government bureaucracies to know how it works.)
Tragically, democracy, these days, is essentially dead. On the surface it appears alive and functioning and the citizenry still thinks it has say, but in reality it's actually like a cockroach that's been parsitized by a wasp—it's 'alive' in appearance only.
Perhaps because in your FPTP electoral system, you have few avenues to actually "let them know that it's a bad idea". I mean, supposing you don't like this particular law - which party would you vote for to send the signal?
People vote like their dad or what the paper (Murdoch) tells them. If you are lucky to have a thinking voter they only get to choose 1 or 2 issues. Maybe they want lower income tax more than something something privacy.
People won't vote against their interests? "Latinos for Trump" etc. Says otherwise. Brexit people getting kicked out of Spain etc.
The only way to prevent this is to avoid this huge, massive, centralisation. Of course, Apple wouldn’t want this.
If we had lots of smaller scale hosting providers around the world (potentially dozens per country), the scope of attacking each one with such an order is much smaller.
"The USA fought a war in part because they did not like the use of general writs of assistance to allow agents of the British King to search peoples houses and papers where their suspicion chanced to fall. The UK lost that war so no way!"
I wouldn't characterize the rest of the world as not obsessed, really.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66256081
Guess we'll have to see what happens in a few months
>Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/uk-demands-apple...
> The 2016 law [Investigatory Powers Act] is nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter and forbids unauthorized disclosure of the existence or contents of a warrant issued under the act.
> "Apple can appeal the UK capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government's needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal," the Post wrote.
Sounds like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets to build the intercept capability.
UK demanding to see private information for citizens in other countries though..
From the article, discussing the idea of Apple stopping offering encryption in the U.K.
“Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States”
You could probably make an ECHR argument about it, but even Germany who are most paranoid about Stasi-like behavior have some sort of rights carveout for law enforcement purposes.
Yes, German law enforcement does have a rights carveout, but not nearly as big of one as in the UK (or the US).
/j
I wonder if a future King William might try something like this, though.
* Come to think of it, Hitler liked three or four of those things too, so this is less demonstrative of character than I imagine.
A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.
The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.
Side A abuses (legal, governmental) power, and instead of "lynching" them for that, we turn the issue into "this will become bad only because of side B will do the same". To me it looks like someone supports side A, and wants to limit the "badness" of whatever they did, but still can't support the thing, so they find the way out by claiming that the other side will do something bad with that data, as if the collecting the data (chats,...) isn't bad enough by itself.
I understand your analogy with friends and facebook, and explaining that stuff to your grandma in this way would probably work... maybe even better if you used "your neighbor Sally works for the government, she could read your chats too, do you really want that?"... but on a technical "forum", it (to me) gives off very politically biased vibes.
I think it's more likely to get broad support when framed as us vs. them where "us" is normal working people regardless of political affiliation and "them" is our government elites trying to spy on us.
If it's associated too strongly with a specific party it alienates too many people to ever get mass support and become a fundamental value that "everyone" agrees on
It's no good having people arguing for "privacy for me but not for thee", which is what it will boil down to. Ultimately authoritarians will use anything which gives them influence and control, with digital privacy violations being one of the easiest to rationalise (no violence, no physical theft).
So I don't see it as worthwhile trying to include such individuals in such a consensus. It's like trying to include foxes in a discussion about how we should best secure hen houses.
Unfortunately that just means there's a lot more sticky work untangling the kind of tribalistic politics we find ourselves in today.
The current ones are already abusing their power, and the other one might hypothetically do something, if and when and if at all.
This is like Alice making it legal and then punching you in the face and instead of you "punching back", you say "this is fine, but Bob is bad, because if he gets voted in, he'll punch harder".
Every encryption backdoor is a huge vulnerability. Even if we somehow ensure that the powers-that-be remain entirely trustworthy (something that, historically, we can't even manage for a century), they're not the only people who'll have access to the backdoor. It's not possible to make an encryption backdoor that only authorised parties can use: as they say, the laws of mathematics do not respect the laws of Australia.
Therefore you know this is not about chasing the bad guys. It's about keeping the Average Joe under the thumb.
I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth.
I'd argue that the opposite is probably true, people who think that crime pays are less smart and more impulsive than the average person, and hence less likely to think about things like this.
From forums of tech experts.
I do not think this attempt by the authorities will be any useful, while it would initially work... well these guys may not be hackers but are not idiots and over time you will get your average baddies become tech-savvy enough to circumvent this.
I think it's a case of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/
People here work at the level of things like RowHammer, normal people don't think past the idea that a padlock icon on the screen makes them safe.
There absolutely is a balance between Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime. Without undermining the former, I'm astounded how HN discounts the latter 100%. It is real.
Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy, especially electronic privacy, almost nobody cares when "we will only allow a small number of agents to use this for imminent terrorist danger" inevitably turns to "we will let any random council worker casually pull up every website you've been to with no warrant"
Someone's encrypted files should be regarded to be in the same category as material they memorized in their brain. Off limits.
Find some other way to get evidence about their wrongdoing to convict them.
That's very clearly not what I wrote. You can demand information this way, not a confession... People in the UK generally have a legal obligation to answer any questions the court has, unless they are themselves the accused. There are a small few other exceptions.
Just because UK law allows compelled disclosure doesn’t make it right—it makes it a bad law. It creates a self-incrimination loophole, shifting the burden of proof onto individuals instead of the state. Leading to erosion of due process and a presumption of guilt, forcing people to either comply or face punishment, even when no crime has been proven. Civil rights advocates have lambasted this law.
So I ask: Do you believe it to be balanced?
Using flawed laws to justify more erosion of privacy only deepens the problem.
I hold neither of the extreme views, and frankly I am baffled by anyone in either of them.
Even in situations where citizen rights do “get in the way” of convicting the guilt, that is the price we pay to not be thrown in jail for crimes we didn’t commit. Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” He also said “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order... and the like.”
I'm not saying, based on that, you throw away privacy rules. But to not even acknowledge that there is a conflict is IMO insane.
Reading through this thread, I get the sense that the desire for absolute privacy stems from a perception of the government as basically another mafia - a ruthless, unprincipled organisation that will exploit any weakness in you, just because. Maybe that's the root of the difference. I'm lucky enough to have never lived in such a country. Sure, I care about government accountability, there will always be bad actors, and governments in general aren't always super-competent, but I believe fundamentally, governments in places I have lived are not evil. They aren't another mafia I need a firewall against.
If you have evidence that he was doing something bad, prosecute him. You must have evidence, because you couldn’t know he was doing something bad based off these chats you can’t read.
>You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators.
So charge them with conspiracy or RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations).
>you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.
How can you possibly know that? If you have evidence of crimes, use that to prosecute. If you don’t have evidence, then you don’t know crimes were committed. Regardless, you don’t even know if these encrypted chats contain anything incriminating.
Government is not another mafia, they are a group of people who are flawed. “Good” governments have laws protecting the rights of citizens against individuals within government. That is like saying that we don’t need defense attorneys because prosecutors are good people and wouldn’t bring a case against an innocent person, or would never bend/break the rules to get a conviction. We have them to protect the rights of the innocent and the guilty.
Which is not to say I approve of more surveillance. Just that surveillance of convenient modes of communication (iMessage) is useful to serious crime fighting.
That's a very bold assumption after EncroChat and SkyECC.
Where does this problem start? Is it a basic education thing that valuing one's own and others' privacy needs to be taught to kids from a young age?
For instance, in the meetings in which these ideas are proposed, why are they not considered a serious, fireable offence, like bringing up racist or sexist comments?
From what I understand, the spy agencies have ways of obtaining your private information that don't necessarily involve blanket requirements to access all users' data (e.g. creative ways of injecting malware into specific people's devices). But those approaches don't scale, of course. And they shouldn't need to.
Hate to tell ya, those aren't fireable offenses at the highest offices anymore either.
It starts with UK citizens buying iPhones and expecting their data to be private at all.
My comment applies just as much to the people working at Apple and Google as to the folks in the UK government.
It doesn't protect against every attack (eg. Stingray or evil maid) but it absolutely would protect you from a situation like the one in the OP. Breaking your encryption can only work if the OEM controls your phone more than you do.
I frankly don't expect the average Apple user to abandon their ecosystem, sunken costs and all that. But I do expect them to reconsider their unconditional support for a company that fights for the right to surveil them. LineageOS is hard to use, but as someone that already got most my apps off F-Droid it's honestly a cinch.
Here's Apple admitting that they just bugged the Push Notification server so the NSA could read them without MITMing anything: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Suffice to say, they don't even have to backdoor the encryption to give the UK what they want. iOS users are like fish in a barrel, if you force some insecure paradigm on them they can either adopt it or leave.
> Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66256081
As a solution to never have unencrypted files in iCloud.
I follow the same procedure with my Android phone, no google cloud.
BTW anything I upload to Dropbox is encrypted first.
Apple says "Encrypted backups can include information that unencrypted backups don't" however the list they give is non-exhaustive. You might find yourself disappointed when trying to restore a non-encrypted backup that you've encrypted yourself in a disaster scenario.
I assume that instead of educating me on how the backups are in a user unreadable format, you chose to make a snide remark and leave me to guess the truth.
Why would anyone trust a backup they cannot read themselves in an emergency?
I thought we had grown ups running the show now. Clearly that was optimistic.
Instead, Tim Cook is writing checks to the NSO Group's favorite President, fighting regulators, suing security researchers, and turning a blind eye to Elon illegally collecting secret Apple testimonies despite his declared opposition to Apple's business.
The UK is begging for scraps, America has been mass-manufacturing dragnet surveillance for years. And Apple even keeps shut about it: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 says you can change your country to opt-out of GCBD.
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42631386 says "iCloud accounts registered outside of China are not affected."
We have had a number of bad laws over the last ten years that have entrenched state surveillance and presumption of guilt.
The only party I can see taking a principled stance on civil liberties is Reform UK, whose policy document states:
> A British Bill of Rights
> Our freedoms must be codified and guaranteed. Never again can our entire country be locked down on shoddy evidence and lies. Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.
https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachme...
Recent polls show Reform is currently the most popular party. So there is hope.
However, since 2016 the party almost exclusively shifted focus to opposing Brexit... which is ironic for a party that describes itself as "Liberal Democrats," trying to overthrow a public referendum (the strongest form of democracy)
The party seems to have lost its way, sadly.
What’s this about? Is it some mad “covid was a hoax” thing?
Reform UK believe that the purported efficacy of the mRNA vaccines at preventing transmission was massively exaggerated (we now know it was).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Reform UK believe that the detrimental side effects of lockdown policy outweighed the benefits of lockdown policy (again, there's evidence to support this view)
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
"While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
We need more voices that are willing to state these truths in Parliament IMO.
Your comment makes it sound like they're all about research, but they also want to ditch human rights and the world health organisation? This conflict of logic makes me think there's probably more to it than just research and doing good in the world. Can it be that they speak of e.g. lockdowns having been bad based on that ReformUK voters were particularly badly affected by that policy and that this study after the fact found that, indeed, they did more harm than good? Ignoring that this wasn't necessarily knowable at the time, but it reflects badly on the government to have made a mistake with hindsight and so they can gain votes since they weren't in power back then and thus the fallacy is to think they'd have known better?
It is disingenous at best to claim that leaving the ECHR means that the UK will abandon or downgrade human rights, unless you have detailed insider information on the proposed British Bill of Rights, and if you're in a position to analyse the relative strength of the ECHR vs the BBR.
I am confident that a new-found ability to send rapists and murderers out of the UK and back to their home country will IMPROVE the human rights of UK citizens.
Okay, let's check the paper.
> Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.
I must conclude, as a party dedicated to the science, that Reform UK therefore would be on board with the above mitigations, if they are genuinely interested in pursuing at least the simplest / cheapest effective mitigations for Covid.
Was that the case?
Could you name an extremist policy that Reform have proposed?
- Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (joining the hallowed company of Russia and Belarus!)
- leaving the World Health Organisation
- get rid of net-zero climate targets, replacing them with fast-tracked approval for more North Sea oil & gas licenses and fracking
- public enquiry on “Vaccine Harms”
2. The WHO is notorious for failures in policy e.g. Covid response, bends to political pressure from China (e.g. not respecting Taiwan as an independent entity), and is dependent on private donors like Bill Gates which means they have undue influence. A 2021 probe into the WHO found its staff were involved in sexual abuse during an Ebola outbreak in Congo. There are plenty of reasons for leaving it. There's nothing extreme about leaving the WHO.
3. We absolutely should get the oil and gas we need from our own reserves, rather than buying it from despotic regimes and shipping it half way round the world at great ecological expense. There's nothing "extreme" about using our own natural resources.
4. We know now that there were many serious side effects from the mRNA injections and that the contracts granting lifetime immunity to the manufacturers for harm were extremely suspicious. This is a totally novel form of medical intervention, administered to a large population in a hurry, under intense political pressure. There's nothing "extreme" about an enquiry on mRNA injection harms. What are we afraid of? Uncovering the truth?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10022421/
"CV events such as thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, stroke, and myocarditis frequently occur with the mRNA vaccines studied. A significant number of studies included in our review reported BNT162b2 events, which presses the need to conduct more research into the CV implications of mRNA‐1273 (Moderna) vaccine."
UK Law Enforcement can suck my dick.
Encryption works people. Use it.
- that’s silly - they can’t do that legally - this makes no technical sense - this is a bad idea - this will never happen
The entire globe becomes Xi Jinpeng’s China with American Characteristics after the iCloud encryption system is neutered and a court warrant is no longer needed.
China is not asking to see other countries’ iCloud data.
> The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-e...
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology...
> The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (c. 25) (nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter)[1] is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which received royal assent on 29 November 2016.[2][3] Its different parts came into force on various dates from 30 December 2016.[4] The Act comprehensively sets out and in limited respects expands the electronic surveillance powers of the British intelligence agencies and police.[4] It also claims to improve the safeguards on the exercise of those powers.[5]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
Not just "see also." Your link is the original reporting.
Without journalists and organizations like these doing hard, expensive work like this no one -- not even on HN -- would know about it.
It's a shame that the link being used for the HN entry is to a blog re-writing other people's work, and not doing any of that work or sharing any of that expense themselves.
Correct link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-e...
No, I don't care if there's a paywall. Credit where credit is due is something your mom should have taught you when you were five.
1: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876174862747930717?lang=en
This is not my opinion, this is just logic.
My opinion on this is that these people are f***g retarded.
iMessage is barely used in the UK, WhatsApp is the default messaging platform here
I had a look at the stats though and you're probably correct about WhatsApp being default, although we do have a surprisingly diverse and competitive messenger market:
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/997945/most-used-messenge...
I also suspect international social structures could play a big role. In the UK many people have friends & family that emigrated to iMessage counties like the US & Australia. But many have links to WhatsApp countries like India or even Telegram countries in Eastern Europe.
Blue bubble is messages you sent via iMessage.
All incoming messages are grey, regardless of whether they were sent to you via SMS or iMessage.
I don't know of any UK plan that charges.
My father doesn't and so pays PAYG rates when he uses his. Which probably makes sense for him, given his infrequent use pattern.
DOGE was recently unable to obtain data on Americans (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musks-doge-deal...), maybe related...
They had read/write data for a few days before being denied access https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-...
Does Apple lose much, in future revenue if people buy out of the ecology in the UK market? At scale, sure. But then again no. It's a 3.8 trillion dollar company. This is almost noise.
I don't think there will be a rush to the door. Set against overall revenue targets, they can comply and weather the storm.
America used to push the rest of the world to give their people those rights. Used to....
I felt an obligation to excessively site stuff here, because I find it bemusing anybody in tech can take such articles or topics at face value.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction#By_the_U...
If Apple can be compelled to keep shut about Push Notifications being bugged, who knows what else they're obligated to keep under the covers. Caveat emptor.
In some way I find the Chinese system preferable in that they're completely transparent about spying and domineering the companies within the country. The only difference in the US is we actively lie about and engage in all this utterly ridiculous LARPing that makes anybody with half a head on their shoulder just despise every player involved.
About the time a country has secret courts and is forcing private entities to lie to others publicly, something has gone very wrong with the direction of the country.
From an account of 30k karma I expected better.
Even if you ignore the above points, Apple's software is closed source. You cannot change OS or install any unapproved app on your own phone. Apple phones are Orwellian's wet dream. If people still trust bigtech then society is doomed.
This is completely false. It has been shown time and time again that Apple will bend to whatever data requests the US government ask for.
You may think they care about your privacy, because they tell you they do. But they are legally bound to say that. Every surveilance program they have ever been part of has had a legal requirement to lie publicly about its existance. Then when it becomes public through a leak, they are able to say 'Sorry we lied, we had to by law'.
Heres just one example: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
Naive implication. They're authoritarian henchmen.
If you're holding out on Apple, a company that has proven to betray every principle they claim to stand for, to defend privacy when money is on the line, then you've been fooled. I don't know how many times Hacker News has to say it before you chumps learn, but Apple is not a privacy-committed company. Being able to point at whitepapers is not the same as knowing how your device functions.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
I should emphasize that 'I personally don't care'. I find it more interesting that people believe there is some safety in Apple products because their marketing says so.
When I was younger, I used to care about these people getting taken advantage of. Today, I wonder how I can replicate the formula. Sorry pals, Apple did it and people were happy about it. I'll make people happy too, its a Noble lie... err Paternal lie :)
> After the Dutch and Canadian police compromised their server in 2016, EncroChat turned into a popular alternative among criminals for its security-oriented services in 2017–2018. The founders and owners of EncroChat are not known. According to Dutch journalist Jan Meeus, a Dutch organized crime gang was involved and financed the developers.
It all begs the question, what else have they requested, and of those which requests were accepted secretly?
Truly a pathetic example of a democracy.
I think Apple has a very short window for a powerful response here. It should be re-using the famous Pirate Bay wording for maximum effect.
But Apple has a massive history of complying with government data requests all over the world. They care not for user privacy one bit, and so this request is not that unusual for them.
It can just order to a third party do so. Wait, why does a third party have access to peoples' private communications. That is the Apple design. The company wants people to use their servers.
If you take the information at face value, they don't.
The government is mandating them to actively infiltrate into people's private communications.
iCloud Backup is not end to end encrypted. iCloud Photos is not end to end encrypted.
Apple can read all of your iMessages and see all of your photos.
The governments where they operate can compel them to turn over this data. They can and do. Often.
Operationally this doesn’t really change much.
DO NOT SPREAD FUD.
If you could be bothered to spend two microseconds on a search engine, you would find this[1] which states IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH :
For users who turn on Advanced Data Protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption rises from 14 to 23 and includes iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec973254c5f/...
When you go to an Apple store and buy and use an iPhone, as millions do, you are prompted to create an Apple Account and log in. iCloud and iCloud Backup are automatically and silently enabled. The device automatically runs non-e2ee backups nightly.
This is how almost every iPhone on Earth runs. Most people don’t even know the feature exists. Even amongst techies that know about it, almost nobody has it enabled.
Cloaking mass privacy violations under "operational matters" is the most doublespeak bullshit I've ever heard.
If you do not control the keys and the software that controls the keys, then you are not using end to end encryption.
In my honest opinion, in this specific context UK should be treated with the same scrutiny we treat China.
Through Five Eyes the US agencies could, via the UK, get global access to iCloud accounts
No need to change US law
Anyone with a fundamental understanding of online privacy and security would encrypt any files prior to uploading them to the cloud rendering any back doors and access to those files useless and toothless.
I dont use any of these services. I have never understood the thinking around uploading your private life to some server in the cloud when they are more secure on an external hard drive at home.
I use online services and sync, but my life is so boring (and data breaches have exposed so much) that a disaster that destroys my house and all backups is far more likely that harm from government or private snooping on my cloud files.
I know we’re supposed to stand on principle and make data storage choices as if today’s cat photo were evidence of being the real JFK assassin, but I don’t have the energy.
I agree that cloud services cannot be trusted to do encryption within their clients, but on platforms like iOS it's difficult to do automated backups using independent encryption. It's also quite difficult not to accidentally enable backups to these services because the setup flow for every phone guides you to hitting the "upload everything I do to Apple/Google".
To Apple's credit, while they normally store a copy of the encryption key, making most cloud encryption entirely useless, they do offer setting a custom key at least. GDrive and OneDrive sure don't.
iOS allows you to perform encrypted backups to your local PC or Mac out of the box.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...
A phone has to at least tell the nearest tower that it's within range so that the tower can know to send it messages. After that, when it get's a message it sends some sort of acknowledgement. In theory anyone can pick up those messages with a phased array or set of directional antennas and get a directional fix on the phone.
psychopathy is a mental disease who impair people to control their impulses/defected judgment; often these are permanent personality traits, which either will let them sit in a prison for the rest of their lives depending on what they did or they will be liberated if they get caught with a high chance of another incidence... search for papers/work from Kent Kiehl if you are interested in this type of stuff
[0] https://www.globalissues.org/news/2009/10/30/3330
I learned only much later that her husband was prosecuted for fraud related to government funds. So she had a good reason to have a dumbphone.
It's anecdotal evidence, but still.
You are of very low opinion of people, probably assuming that you are smarter because you are some kind of IT guy.
And you are likely wrong.
Does she? Law enforcement can wiretap and track dumbphones just as easily as smart phones. The lack of encrypted calling/texting options even make it easier for law enforcement. If she's trying to hide more fraud, the dumbphone isn't helping her. And of course if she is trying to hide fraud from law enforcement, she probably shouldn't be doing the fraud in the first place.
There are good reasons for using dumbphones (smartphones distract, and it's having a serious impact on everyone these days) but avoiding being prosecuted isn't one.
Depends on your threat model. If someone unofficial wanted at what you're doing, they'd likely find it easier to go after your home data than what you have in iCloud -- particularly if using Advanced Data Protection for iCloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756
Also, ask the folks in Los Angeles how those external hard drives at home are working out for them in the fires. There are many types of threats.
So if you ever wonder how they access those WhatsApp messages, when you think that they would be end-to-end encrypted, reality is something else.
Meanwhile, the amount of local news arrests for people getting busted for uploading CSAM to online platforms like Google and Apple is exponentially increasing.
The average "criminal" is an idiot.
Even people concerned with security who know a little seem to be terrible at it.
A local protest group in my area was passing around an image with security tips. They were hilariously bad, suggestions based on very confused understandings of risk. These people weren’t criminals necessarily, but they were motivated and concerned and somehow just terrible at basic security.
What's the inverse of survivor bias?
There is the possibility that there is a great deal more crime being commuted by capable super criminals who understand the nuances of security .... but I'm more of a subscriber to the theory that for "most" crime, it's a lot of stupid people.
Most of the time, people become terrorists, criminals or child abusers because they're stupid, not because they're smart.
This is a well worn path for the CIA gather dirt without needing to break any rules on monitoring US citizens.
"If you want to sell phones in our country, you have to give us access to anyone we say is a criminal using your phones in any country".
"You are asking us to break the law in those other countries."
"Do you want to sell phones in our country, or not? We know you'll blink first."
(Will Apple blink? I don't know. But I am confident that the UK government is filled with people who assume they will).
And Apple argued to the UK Parliament when the relevant law was being enacted that it violates the right to privacy confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights, which other countries will still be bound by even if the UK follows through on its occasional threat to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The UK doesn't have the geopolitical clout it once did, especially not after Brexit.
Aye.
But (1) I don't think the UK government really understands that, and (2) for intelligence operations, they might still have enough.
Everyone else has the exact same dichotomy of simultaneously wanting all the computers safe from other hackers while also hacking everything themselves, and many also want the added extra of guaranteed citizen's right to privacy, so legal fights like this are advantageous to most nations: all the other countries watching this get to have their cake (they can spy on encrypted comms) while eating it too (in this metaphor, when Apple is found out, they get to punish Apple and pretend to be above such things).
I also don't know which way this will go, and indeed this is a big part of Apple's brand.
And the next day this or blocking DeepSeek (in Italy).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975170
They're not exactly the same, but you should have similar feelings about forcing a company to hand over data to researchers and forcing a company to install a back door for law enforcement.
All of the sudden people start caring, acting like they never had the chance to regulate their OEM of choice. No, you get exactly what you paid for. You trust Apple, don't you? They're a prestige company, they'd never sell you out. Probably. Oops[0].
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
Here we are, though, at the point where the government overreach for these "beacons of democracy" such as US and UK do this often and by design and we're all supposed to pretend "thing are fine, trust us". Next they'll push some other overreach using children, terrorism, drugs or some other usual excuse and people will defend it pretending the government has good intentions and largely works for the people.
Why is it tho ? The government has something to hide ? i mean it's complete bullshit, citizen have the right to privacy and government has the obligation of transparency and being accountable to its citizens.
When did the UK turned into a middle east dictatorship ?
> Google has enforced default encryption for Android phone backups since 2018. When asked by The Post whether any government had requested a backdoor, Google spokesman Ed Fernandez did not provide a direct answer but suggested none exist: "Google cannot access Android end-to-end encrypted backup data, even with a legal order," he stated.
That is absolutely laughable. If the uk government couldn't access google data, they would have ordered google the same thing they did with apple.
Apple theoretically can't access their user data when e2e encryption is enabled yet the uk government doesn't care. how does that differ from google ?
once again, if you want your data to be safe from google, apple, and the others you got to avoid all cloud and resort to use good old hard drive with encryption.
the only ones getting fcked are once again the average people who don't have much to hide in the first place, the pedophiles and terrorist they are much more aware than the old fart at the government on how to stay hidden.
(I suppose the silver lining is that Starmer is merely sidling towards Trump as his new best mate rather than the full-throated slobbering that Johnson/Truss/Sunak would have given him.)
[0] I know this is primarily the fault of the last lot but this shower of onions haven't done anything to roll it back and/or clarify WTF is going on.
"No."
Sounds like quite the conspiracy theory, but if the USA were not OK with this, the UK surely wouldn’t dare to take on a crown jewel in the US tech sector, potentially causing them serious problems.
Hence why Trump was cheering on Starmer the other day, despite all that has gone on between them.
Americans need to wake up and realise their state uses uk/israel to do what they don't want to be seen to be doing.
as a side note, its really baffling what this capability would actually provide for? Any serious criminal isn't using icloud backup or even an iPhone in the first place. So this is just a shit outcome for the general population.
If this goes through, I look forward to the news of the world expose on some cabinet members personal details
What does that even mean?
that's extra revenue for the u.k gvt.
the security guards, the care workers etc - which people are working those jobs ? immigrants or spouses of immigrants.
right now the conservative leader Kemi is campaining to increase permanent residency to 10 years. & citizenship to 15 years. who's gonna stay for that in a country where electricity & basic bills are expensive as hell.
skilled native british people are leaving & getting replaced by migrants. the doctors at the nhs majority are foreign trained.
https://freespeechunion.org/manchester-police-name-quran-bur...
Muslim abuser who 'didn't know' that sex with a girl of 13 was illegal is spared jail
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid...
I am aware of people being jailed in the UK for making terrorist threats on social media, and arguably those prosecutions were inappropriate, but that doesn't appear to be what you're claiming.
[1] https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/uk-author...
Similarly, the links again show that you are whitewashing the events: those people jailed weren’t “disagreeing with the extreme left” (every leftist would be in jail since they disagree with each other constantly) but for things like saying they were going to a violent protest and advocating burning down hotels where refugees were living. Going to a highly plausible specific threat is quite far beyond disagreement.
I'm not aware of any arrests for "disagreeing with the extreme left", which is what I'm specifically asking about. It's important not to distort facts to fit a narrative.
As you probably know, we don't have first amendment protection in the UK.
It's also a silly story. The dual criminality requirement, and various other considerations, make it virtually certain that no such extradition will occur. Those who fear that the UK is descending into a dystopian hell may be comforted to know that we have the world's stupidest police officers. Your news story can't even be bothered to track down the specific moron who made this statement (Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley), referring instead to a fictional 'head of police'.
I'm not in either country but I'm pretty outraged at the amount of this crap going on all over the western world. I'm also an Apple customer but I'm pretty upset that I have to rely on a big corporation to defend my right to privacy from foreign snoopers.
I also think it's counterproductive to try to play the "your government is worse than mine" game. We should all be pointing the fingers at all of these governments (and their authoritarian big tech allies) all over the world.
This, right after Islamists killed people in Europe for burning the Koran.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/04/manchester-polic...
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 was one of the big things (before Brexit) that made me realise the UK wasn't a suitable place to run a tech business.
It hasn't noticeably improved.
"Full endorsement" of the electorate isn't how representative democracy works. Given FPTP, the government got a huge majority of seats with 33.7% of the votes, but as there's not universal voting that's only 14% of the actual population, and even with those who did vote it's not clear how many people were voting "not the other lot".
Also the wider part of this order is that Apple would access to the international users data, including US customers, if I understand the article correctly.
I'd probably categorize that more as "declining to halt" rather than "refusing to halt", AFAIK the US government doesn't have an actual law/mandate/whatever for non-governmental organizations on that front.
If he's antagonising Trump it's for a reason. Perhaps to avoid showing weakness by being too keen.