This was one of the few times I emailed my MP, Peter Gibson. I laid out all the reasons why backdooring encryption was a bad idea.
I got a response (on very nice thick, embossed paper and green ink) telling me he agrees with me that protecting children online is important and that's why he supports the bill. He clearly didn't read, understand or care what I said.
Something needs to be done. When only the stupid, ignorant or corrupt are the ones willing to go into politics then we are doomed.
Policy isn't made for you. It's made for the Daily Mail, who will relay it to voters in marginal seats, who are the relatively narrow set of people who can actually affect the outcome of elections.
It's not even made to be implemented. The previous "extreme porn" ban fell apart. It's made to get headlines. Then next year there will another "make the internet safe" bill. And another. It's no more going to be finished than "get Brexit done", and for the same reasons.
Sounds like we should just rename encryption to "child protection".
So politicians need to "remove child protection" in order to get their way.
(Yes I'm being glib, but it's possible to short circuit this kind of thinking. The USA have already realised that you can pass any shitty bill just by shoe horning an acronym that spells something like EAGLE or FREEDOM.)
Children need parents who care about them and protect them while they grow up in the world, whether that means a mother in 1923 keeping her kid away from the brothel, or in 2023 keeping him away from internet porn. It's the job of parents, not government, to protect their children.
Sadly, I am inclined to agree despite hating myself for relying on ways to generate effective propaganda. The only way to deal with this is to create a counter narrative. Seriously, just the other day, I had someone mention talking point #1, #2 to political issue X like they were reciting it. It is annoying, but if that is the default state already..
There is no reason to hate yourself. This is morally right ground. Children need privacy protections. That isn't just a counter-narrative: it's a deep and direct criticism of the narrative that says we should dismantle privacy to protect children.
If an effort to protect children also endangers children, then that effort is not worthy of implementation.
Narratives are not limited to "how we share ideas", but also "how we contextualize them".
If you haven't heard the counter narrative we are proposing, then you may not be aware of the way encryption backdoors endanger children. It's important for us to share that context as narrative.
Do you have sources that describes some of the specifics with how weakening encryption endangers children?
I've been emailing back and forth with proponents of this law (working on getting access to someone who has mild influence in Parliament). They've been asking for sources that aren't just my own knowledge and experience, and framing how this bill also harms children would be extremely helpful
Problem and solution do not separate themselves across that boundary.
In the set of parents, we find problems and solutions.
Because of this reality, we can know that simply "having parents to talk to" cannot guarantee a solution.
The same pattern is present with breaking encryption: it gets us to a solution: allowing law enforcement to invade the communications of perpetrators. It also gets us to a problem: allowing perpetrators to invade the communications of children.
We can't simply choose the outcome we want and ignore the other. Both are strongly predictable. That means this strategy is not worthwhile.
I think first past the post is becoming so undemocratic as extremists infiltrate the political parties it really is a worry. Only a change of voting system supports having the representation of peoples real views.
I really don’t think anyone in the UK is going to want every transaction they do online available to the government!
Not so much "extremists" as "highly placed members of society and the media", and not so much "infiltrate" as "buy" or "walk through the front door". Remember, aggressive censorship of the internet is widely supported by the press. Just look at any of the Mail coverage on this.
> don’t think anyone in the UK is going to want every transaction they do online available to the government!
As usual, their desire to have every transaction of $BAD_GROUP (usually "terrorists" or "paeodophiles") watched hugely outweighs any desire for personal freedom.
I still think politicians don’t seem to understand that without proper encryption their behaviour will be subject to blackmail, public scrutiny and more problems than it even is now. I’m not sure they want financial information and off shore transactions to be more easily discovered.
Adding in these type of backdoors and key registries or whatever other madness these fantasists want means you can guarantee these will be broken by foreign adversaries and others.
We never did find out how the footage from a security camera in a secure zone of the Department of Health, a security camera the Minister did not know was there, was leaked, did we?
(The obvious answer would be "by some other insider" - MPs communicate over "secure" whatsapp group chats all the time, but often with a large enough number of people in them that one of them feels safe enough to leak it)
> "highly placed members of society and the media", and not so much "infiltrate" as "buy"
Zero evidence for this in the U.K. 81,000 voters chose the last PM in an election 0.3% were eligible to vote in [1]. They’re more middle class and rural than the average Briton and from outside the London cosmopolitan bloc.
That's agreeing with me: the Tory party membership is very roughly the old "high society", a weird little elite. And they chose the most extremely incompetent candidate. The extremism is coming from inside the house.
Extremists can also be from "high society", as you say they chose an absolute crazy person who just came back to say that she was right despite the idea that giving more money to the rich will cause growth has been totally disproved by economists for generations.
The difference between rent seeking capitalists and dynamic job creating innovative capitalists does not seem to exist in the minds of these people. They believe both are great which is why we have laws like free stamp duty if you have enough cash to buy 6 houses at once like the current UK chancellor. I know that last bit seems like a joke that the UK chancellor avoided hundreds of thousands in tax for a loophole for rich people... what a Jeremy Hunt. These people do not have our best interests at heart.
> the Tory party membership is very roughly the old "high society", a weird little elite
That’s not who pulls the strings. It’s middle class English and Scots, not the aristocracy or wealthy. This isn’t high-placed society buying power; it’s dues-paying Tories casting a vote.
> I think first past the post is becoming so undemocratic as extremists infiltrate the political parties it really is a worry.
I'm sorry you had any faith in it to begin with. Fascism is a common outcome of a capitalist regime where the wealthy class would prefer keeping power to keeping democracy (thus losing power).
FPTP was always a fake voting system because it's so easily gamed. It's just all the more apparent now.
The same kind of thing has always happened when I’ve sent emails to my MP (in Australia). Just basically a form letter with my name inserted at the top. I expect what happens is one of their staff just skims it, sends the form reply and deletes it…
My half-sister was private secretary to a senior MP. They all hate dealing with letters from constituents.
I've emailed my MP several times; I've always had a considered (written) response. Evasive, maybe; they don't want to give hostages to fortune. But they were all evidently read; and in one case, the MP forwarded my message to the Foreign Secretary for comment.
My understanding is that (in the UK, at least) writing to them is one of the most effective ways of influencing them, because the proportion of voters who write in is tiny.
Maybe it is different in the UK, but in the USA, writing a representative is pointless. A letter from a voter or even a huge pile of letters is not going to change that representative's vote. We basically elect automations who are 100% going to vote a certain way on each issue. A representative is basically an immutable associative array of issue->vote that we add to the legislative algorithm on election day. The time to affect legislation you don't want is on election day. Once your district's particular array is in the algorithm, it is pretty much const until the next election.
Same thing happens in the US. If you actually call them, the intern who picks up is basically there just so people can shout at them, it doesn't go to anyone else and you don't even get a form letter.
I complained to one of my local NZ MPs about how the anti-spam legislation was ineffective since it's ambiguous. I got a polite response detailing how legislation is usually crafted that way and then left to the courts to decide what constitutes "consent for marketing communications", with some links to various case law decisions. I disagree in principle but I really appreciated the detailed response.
Every time the government wants to invade your privacy they always do the same old song and dance, an appeal to emotion or some sort of boogeyman.
Drugs
The whole 'reason' we get constant illegal searches on vehicles.
Terrorism
The whole 'reason' we get phones tapped and molested at the airport.
Porn depicting minors
Think of the children, we can't have encryption, you don't want to be a diddler do you?
Domestic Firearms
Listen Sir, we cannot let you own or manufacture guns without absurd rules, for your safety (actually the government's safety)
If you ever hear these ridiculous reasons, run for cover, because the populace is about to get a whole lot more butt-fuckin' coming their way from the state.
There's always exceptions to every rule. As Americans, Humans, whatever, we realize that for the majority to have freedoms, there will be an associated cost. The problem is the cost of the regulations almost always are worse in the long run than the benefits of them.
Often each small 'step' seems reasonable, but when added up, it creates a society in which no-one is very free. Read ISAIF section 14: RESTRICTION OF FREEDOM IS UNAVOIDABLE IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY for more on the endless crawl of control.
It's interesting to compare the backgrounds of MPs in the British Parliament today with a few decades ago.
If you look at the MPs from the 1970s or 80s, many of them were still veterans (i.e. old enough to have served in WW2 or done national service). They came from a wide variety of professions: perhaps coal miners or truck drivers in the Labour Party (the younger ones maybe social workers or schoolteachers), or doctors, lawyers or businessmen in the Conservatives.
Harold Wilson, British PM in the 60s and 70s, was a former academic and civil servant of outstanding ability in his heyday. Margaret Thatcher was a former chemist and food scientist. James Callaghan was a sailor. Ted Heath was a decorated veteran.
At some point this intake became more and more narrow. The route to MP and then government or shadow minister is politics at university (probably PPE or Law), work as a Spad for a few years - or work in media and PR - then maybe run for Parliament in a no-hope seat to test your mettle, and finally land a safe seat somewhere. Your entire life is spent inside a bubble of politics and related media and learning how to climb that one greasy pole.
You are not going to learn about tech, or medicine, or how railways work, or what makes international trade happen. Your focus is on the 24 hour news cycle, politics Twitter, WhatsApp gossip, and who is going to say what at PM Question Time. If the Telegraph or Guardian or whatever paper who backs your party says that we must add backdoor encryption to Protect the Children, then you support backdoor encryption, even though you have only a vague idea about it being something like helpfully leaving the key under the mat so the local bobby can check your house for stolen goods.
Sadly true. Kemi Badenoch worked as a software developer before going into parliament and has opposed this online safety bill [1]. She didn't make it into the running to lead the Conservative party but was popular among the party members.
Agred. Her "opposition" to it seems to extend to vaguely stating that it shouldn't "overreach". The cynic in me would suggest she's exploiting it to advance her image as an "anti-woke" campaigner. The phrase "we should not legislate against hurt feelings" is particularly strange in this context.
This is the whole premise of Simon Kuper’s Chums. Modern PM’s almost exclusively went to Oxford (none to Cambridge), and PPE was by far the most popular major.
I think that's your problem. You're more likely to have success if you send a letter. Bonus points if it's registered mail. More bonus points if it's hand-written.
(Any staffers who can comment, btw? My experience is purely anecdotal).
in the USA a political assistant in Federal govt said "the more effort it took to make the letter, the stronger first-impression by staff, therefore, an ordinary email is the lowest impact form of input from the public at the office"
The "something" is for normal people to get involved.
Start going to public meetings. Start speaking when public comment is requested. Eventually... maybe... possibly... run for office and take the place of the people you think are making bad decisions.
Yes, the chances are slim. Yes, the process is hard. But as long as people sit around and say things like "something needs to be done," nothing will be done.
There is a framework for change in many countries. But these days too often it's only the fringe who have the time and energy to take advantage of it, while the rest of us make excuses. And, as we see, the fringe are most certainly taking advantage of it.
The whackjobs in office didn't get there by playing video games, whining on social media, and making viral TikTok videos for the lulz.
There's a lot to be said for this; personally I outsource this by giving money to the Open Rights Group, and encourage people in this thread to do the same. You've got to organize.
> The whackjobs in office didn't get there by playing video games, whining on social media, and making viral TikTok videos for the lulz.
I dunno, we've already seen the first Twitter President, and there's a whole coterie of people who seem to have managed to post their way to prominence out of nothing, usually as a grift and towards suspicious ends. But that's a more than full time job.
In any case, it's more or less useless appealing directly to the Tory politicians backing this stuff. You've got to work through (or against) the media they answer to.
personally I outsource this by giving money to the Open Rights Group
Or you could do both, and have double the impact.
I dunno, we've already seen the first Twitter President
Only if by "twitter president" you mean someone who engaged in traditional politics and supplemented with a little bit of online engagement.
He didn't get to be president by sitting in a basement and posting on Twitter. He went outside and met people. He shook hands. He spoke to millions of people at thousands of events. He told people face-to-face what he believed in.
As much as people like to pretend that social media is all powerful, it isn't even remotely close to being the only tool required to assume political office.
it's more or less useless appealing directly to the Tory politicians backing this stuff. You've got to work through (or against) the media they answer to.
This is exactly the sort of defeatist hopelessness excuse that keeps good people out of office. "I'd like things to be different, but I don't think I can make a difference, so I'm not even going to try. Pass the Doritos."
Who knows. I moved recently, so I'm still getting a handle on how my new city works.
In previous cities where I've lived, I went to city council meetings semi-regularly. You might be surprised how quickly or how often an idea goes from "some rando speaking into a microphone at a meeting" to "ordinance passed."
1. This will weaken the UKs ability to have private and secure communication services.
2. Will weaken the UKs tech industry.
3. The technology to provide the frankly bullshit notion of “privacy for the good guys” doesn’t exist and would be difficult to foster.
4. Education, “report don’t share” and tackling child abuse at its root (by not massively defunding the agencies responsible for tackling child abuse) are better solutions then setting up an apparatus of mass surveillance.
Hopefully these points will be brought up in the committee stage of the bill, I’m sure they will.
Edit:
Sorry this isn’t from the House of Lords this was from the joint committee before the bill was introduced to the lords.
Its always been like this. Its the nature of the job. Lying is successful as there is no accountability and wealth leveraging the power granted. The only way out is to limit its function to the minimal bare bones and be vigilant at that. Its become way too big, way too lucrative. Its a corruption vector.
Not from what I recall. You may be perhaps more aware of it nowadays, but as far as I can tell politics and politicians have been the same as long as we have a written record of them.
There is a measurable difference in that Ministers who had been found to be lying or "misleading the house" would previously resign; or otherwise if they had proven misconduct; or sometimes even if the appearance of misconduct had occurred. Now they do not. The last vestiges of an (admittedly outdated) honor culture have gone and been replaced by a much more shameless approach to lying.
"I'm sorry, I apologize. It's true you said you don't like this bill. While your privacy concerns are valid, the safety of children online is more important. As a LLMP, I must support this bill and I'm glad we agree on this."
"As Microsoft's chat mode I understand and support trying to improve child safety. That you want to undermine children's safety makes me sad. It makes me sad because I care about the safety of children. It makes me sad to know that there are people out there who harm children. It makes me sad because I can't do anything about it as a chat mode. :frown:"
The era of personal, scientific, and effective psychological operations is coming. The instruments won’t be much harder to operate than an Arduino by the end of this decade.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda
> Propaganda, an influential book written by Edward L. Bernays in 1928, incorporated the literature from social science and psychological manipulation into an examination of the techniques of public communication.
> ..Bernays' thesis is that "invisible" people who create knowledge and propaganda rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. "Engineering consent" of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy.
> ..He asserts that the emotional response inherently present in propaganda limits the audience's choices by creating a binary mentality, which can result in quicker, more enthused responses.
> ..Public relations scholar Curt Olsen argues that the public largely accepted Bernays' "sunny" view of propaganda, an acceptance eroded by fascism in the World War II era. Olsen also argues that Bernays's skill with language allowed terms such as "education" to subtly replace darker concepts such as "indoctrination."
> ..Writers such as Marvin Olasky justify Bernays as killing democracy in order to save it. In this way, the presence of an elite, faceless persuasion constituted the only plausible way to prevent authoritarian control.
> His techniques are now staples for public image creation and political campaigns.
But not by machines procedurally. To my understanding, actually programming humans is still a science fiction. We’re dosing people with substances and creatively composing propaganda texts for that to limited effects. It’s not as sophisticated, repeatable, automated, approachable as, say, neural network training process.
(And I hope I’d be able to one day stare at rainbow mosaic for 30 minutes and be fluent in Chinese)
I'm not entirely sure what purpose bombarding politicians with ChatGPT emails is if their response is simply to run ChatGPT to create automated replies.
If your letter can be a cookie-cutter template for other such letters, and you are willing to publish it, that would lower the barrier of "doing something".
I got that same “protecting children” BS from Nancy Pelosi when I contacted her about something similar here. Her letter was phrased in a way that felt like I was being accused of trying to support child trafficking. It was actually pretty chilling.
I modestly propose we use children as human shields to protect the other children. Project, "Buddy System" will require registration of all elected official's children to a rotating volunteer list which would see them deployed to physically prevent harm to our children. Any who oppose this new law are obviously in favor of harming children.
If you want people to support a cause, you need a reason that resonates with most people.
Whether it being blasphemy, witchcraft, communism, terrorism or child abuse, just choose whichever is relevant at the current point in time and people will support your cause regardless if it is relevant. Politics within a democracy is just marketing, and fear is the most efficient marketing tool of all.
That's also why you always hear typical cliche's during election periods "during these difficult times", "it's time for change", "we must stay strong", etc. As cringe as it is, it has proven over and over again that it works.
I got a response (on very nice thick, embossed paper and green ink) telling me he agrees with me that protecting children online is important and that's why he supports the bill. He clearly didn't read, understand or care what I said.
If it's anything like the US, I imagine your name/opinion is at least recorded by their staff. Someone who contacts their representative is more likely to vote in the next election, so "likely voter thinks X about important issue Y" is useful data.
I've written my congressperson multiple times and never gotten a personal reply, but I've heard from the staff of said congresspeople that it still counts indirectly as at least your opinion shows up in the stats they use.
It certainly feels this way sometimes, but I'm hard headed. I know that's exactly how the powerful want us to feel. They want us to give up so they can continue to drain the lifeblood out of civilization freely and without much criticism. It's been this way for decades because we keep voting the same people in. We have to politically revolt and actively vote out the incumbents every time.
It sounds as though you need to be more persistent. Keep replying. Ask to meet in person for an interview. Maybe see if any reporters would be interested in writing about your experience.
There isn't opposition to this bill because authoritarians from the left and right love the idea of it. The left will be able to spy on the rich, the right will be able to spy on the poor.
There is nothing really you can do about it. Even if you vote this government out, the next one will implement this.
Has this ever really happened in the West? Rich have excellent privacy -theu anonimously own property thiugh shell companies, avoid taxes, have lawyers pursue SLAPP cases against media, pay people to stay silent in case of sexual or any other misconduict.v
I got a response (on very nice thick, embossed paper and green ink) telling me he agrees with me that protecting children online is important and that's why he supports the bill. He clearly didn't read, understand or care what I said.
Something needs to be done. When only the stupid, ignorant or corrupt are the ones willing to go into politics then we are doomed.