The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. No amendments have been accepted that would mitigate the bill’s most dangerous elements. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.
Bad actors are already commiting crimes, they will have no trouble “illegally” using encryption software to keep their message hidden. Encryption is just math, you cannot stop a computer from performing an encryption algorithm.
You can however “make it illegal” for software to do this, what just results in normal citizens having unencrypted communication, while people who are up to no good are still encrypting their stuff.
🤦
Yeah they know that. The whole “let’s stop criminals and terrorists” bit is just an excuse.
The conservative government in the UK is really weird and they actually want to be a dictatorship, but they’re just not very good at it. I have no idea why they are doing this.
The thing is it’s also unlikely to achieve that objective as well because they highly likely to be voting out of power next year. So basically this is a pointless law in every possible regard.
Which is the point. They want to spy on everybody.
Or just stealing someone’s phone, doing whatever they want to do, toss it in a river, and not have anything traced back to them