Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...

Indeed. I can't understand the people who blindly believe any law is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good? What's good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused? Then maybe it should be changed?

I advocate that every law should have an annual review to catalog every case where it has been applied. How many were sensible positive outcomes? How many were unintended consequences? How many were clear abuses of the letter of the law? Every legislator should vote on the record based on that annual review to either renew or cancel the law.

I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you actively want the world to be a worse place because you believe that that is how the world works.

There exist more kinds:

- the "rebel": "this is a law/rule, so I have to trespass it". This often holds for people who are either annoyed by rules or red tape or for people who see no hope of changing the law. An example are the "blade runners" in London who organize to destroy lots of surveillance cameras at once, in particular those that are used to enforce low-emission laws. [1]

- the "evil": "this is law, so I will (ab)use it for my personal gain".

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...

Some are also doing it for the technical challenge, especially those working on new tech rather than refining what already exists. Like the people who try to solve the great problems of mathematics/physics (or find interesting new ones) for the challenge of it (and sometimes refuse prizes & recognition if they do solve or otherwise discover something vital).

This sort of person is often blinkered to the possible extreme long-term outcomes, or are able to mentally separate themselves from them (“I just made the discovery, I didn't use it to do anything bad” or “I was paid for it, follow the money source and blame them”). Of course once a genie is out of the bottle, other sorts of people are more than eager to ask it for wishes…

Suppose there is some peon at Microsoft who is ordered to write code for Pluton and then does it because they don't want to be fired, expecting to hide behind the Nuremberg defense. The people in your second group will naturally disapprove of this.

But regardless of that, we can ask the same question of the person giving the orders. Someone in these companies initiated these programs, so are they merely fools who couldn't predict the obvious consequences that others did, or are they truly malicious?

What? I don't understand how this is a "two kinds of people" generalization, when the two categories aren't even mutually-exclusive?

One can think a law is bad and should change, while simultaneously recognizing the rule of law and following it.

It's pretty weird to try to pit those two perspectives against each other

That said, I'm not going to pretend I'm one of those people who say "this law doesn't make sense, we must change it." it's more like "this law is not convenient to me right now and I am willing to suffer the consequences of breaking it" but frankly I'm not going to start a grassroots effort to try to change it.

Don't forget the selfish jerks who simply ask for whatever class of traffic that isn't them to be punitively regulated to their benefit.

(both literally and transferrable to other issues as a metaphor)

While I don't doubt that's a motivation, the problem I have is it's really a question of likelihood. I feel that in terms of security focus it's very common for people to put on blinders and ignore the likelihood of an exploit in favor of "Ooooh look at this thing that COULD be exploited!"

It's fundamentally the problem I have with how CVEs are reported and handled in general.

In terms of secure boot stopping problems. Yes, it does stop someone from rooting a device which is great. However, someone that has access to root a device almost certainly also has the ability to just install a virus in the OS startup scripts. Or to modify a user executable. Or to modify the user's PATH environment variable to inject a malicious app in front of a commonly used one.

That's what I wish security focused people would weigh more heavily when they evaluate these sorts of threats. "What other damage could a malicious individual do if they had the same permissions to pull off this exploit."

The problem with it is that the people who want to use a central point of trust as a chokepoint for censorship, surveillance and monopolization keep claiming that this is required when it isn't.

> Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or whatever)

The premise being that if you have a monopoly then ordinary people can trust it. Only that isn't the case. A monopolist not only can be just as malicious or incompetent as any of the multiple players in a competitive landscape, they're more likely to be because the lack of competitive pressure allows them to be more abusive and complacent and more capable of capturing the government.

> under a certain age, if they took photos or videos of other kids, that makes them liable to be on a list, for life

That seems like a problem caused by the law. Why is it possible for any actions taken as a minor to cause someone to be put on a permanent list when we recognize that minors aren't mature enough to be held responsible for that?

> Now imagine not being able to get that photo back.

Now imagine what would be necessary to get it back. It's on some other person's private device. Either you invade everyone's privacy and private communications to check if they might have it or be privately sharing it, or they could be. The cure is worse than the disease.

We were the vanguard blocking this to the public's benefit, now they've voted for it our only duty is to ourselves; to make sure the rules don't apply to us.

Believe me, the people writing the age verification laws care a great deal whether the age verification can be turned off by the device owner.

The whole exercise would be pointless if teenage device owners could turn the censorship off.

It's a kind of blindness. The kind that is, in my opinion, is one of the major reasons why we ended up building a world that's more than a bit dystopian.

Or even surveillance, for that matter.

Plenty of hubris, mind.

Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.

"Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.

You can argue that exerting control is a good thing - a clever scam artist convinces a vulnerable user to paste an attack at the command line, and the benevolent OS vendor uses their control makes the attack impossible, no matter what the scam artist tells the user to do. A greedy software maker produces a spyware-laden, cookie-stealing update and asks the user to enter the admin password to install the update. The benevolent OS vendor uses their control to make such malicious updates impossible, even with the administrator password entered.

But even if the control is being used exclusively for good, it is, ultimately, control.

See: the PRC. Support for surveillance is allegedly high. Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin), they generally like it. Makes them feel safe.

The CPC has sold them on a vision of them as members of the state-race "Chinese" (which is not really an ethnicity any more than "American" is) and the surveillance as a thing that keeps them and their "Chinese" lifestyle safe from non-Chinese. Uighurs have to be extra surveilled until they're also Chinese, which, many are now according to the CPC.

So PRC citizens feel safe and cozy among in the country for "their people," not realizing this whole ethnonationalist concept is at best 100 years old, maybe even younger. During the Qing dynasty, there's a whole hell of a lot of people that think of themselves as "Chinese" that definitely weren't by the dynastic government.

I smell similar happening in Russia, the USA, and Israel, with State support. It looks like right wing groups are trying to pull it off in the UK and Germany as well.

Good tech empowers individuals and subverts authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments. Bad tech subverts individuals and empowers authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments.

I'd argue that giving governments and corporations control over our devices has also been an unmitigiated disaster. You could say the same thing about any kind of freedom though couldn't you? Freedom is so dangerous after all. Look at all the problems it's caused. Giving up all of our freedoms would surely make the world better right?

> I really abhor "technical libertarians"...

Well, I abhor those who try to take freedom away from people. So the feeling is mutual I guess.

The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views.

The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example.

Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity, it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state. This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not include your safety.

Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government (violence) should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift.

Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.

This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding this.

It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0" the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture consent.

The last time they did this they contracted saatchi and saatchi to run an a disturbing campaign: https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-bl...

I'm thinking something that automatically scans your computer for porn or other things, like ripped film mp4s and sends it to the goverment to be analysed.

Or perhaps little gps trackers that children are mandated to wear at all times.

I agree that this is the wrong direction to develop into.

A nuclear weapon is a tool. You can use it to blast a city-killing asteroid, one you just noticed, into pieces that'd burn in the atmosphere (and miss the city). You can also use it to mass murder an entire population.

> it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy.

The capacity exists, but it's not necessarily used all the time. We should create the legal frameworks to protect ourselves from the misuse of the technology.

Are any of us expecting that there are safeguards in today's global political environment? in tomorrow's?

Honestly, the only safeguards against abuse of surveillance are that the surveillance not happen in the first place.

Once it has happened, the only safeguards keeping the owners of the system from using it to coerce and control the masses exist in the form of pitchforks and ropes wielded by the masses, and the days when that was a real potential for repealing any such coercion and control are fully in the distant past.

These systems are made possible and installed beyond the reach of any constituent based consent - see the current condition of Ring cameras, Flock, and the many tools created by Palantir et. al and much like the boiled frog analogy the citizenry has sat in their movie theatre and restaurant seats telling each other soothing lies about how the goal was to make us even safer from ourselves and now we are steps away from the fully immersive per-person verified identity and 24-7 observation of what everything, everyone read, writes, says, and does. Exactly as the 'foil hats' have been telling them would happen if they didn't speak up sooner.

Tough cookies, we all get exactly what we deserve for letting it get this far out of hand. It's no use crying over spilt milk.

The cost is manageable as long as it's used for the right reasons and that the data is kept secure. The benefits of deterring violence outweigh those risks.

Billionaires may be a bigger threat but criminals are a threat nonetheless.

This is just not true. See 4.17 here, for example [1]

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/cons...

Then let's talk about THAT!! why is that not the discussion instead of "nah, we'll find a solution some other day, for now, let's not solve anything"??

> Even among the few permitted verification methods,

These laws are still being debated, what's permitted has not been decided, why is Signal not advocating for a privacy friendly alternative. Why are our options lose all privacy to the most horrible people ever who will do us harm versus let the children suffer!

> You may have to trust a company you never heard of before.

Why do I have to? Why can't the government itself issue something as simple as a timestamp CA certificate signature for a secret that expires every few weeks, requiring facial/ID verification directly with the government to generate a new secret? the site only needs to verify that the signature is correct. a signed token you show random sites. and this is the most naive idea i brought up for discussion without things like zkp even considered. Lawmakers aren't being told by the likes of Signal "there is a better way to do this, let's discuss" they're being told "ignore what all the scientists, research, law enforcement, social workers are telling you so we can watch porn in secret".

> For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine.

It absolutley did not work fine! the toll of human suffering is inexcusably abominable! I shudder in confusion between whose head i should rip off or why this damn planet hasn't been burned down to ashes already at the very thought of all that has been perpetrated using this technology. The internet multiplied and empowered many things, chief amongst them is human cruelty and apathy.

> For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine....

Save your breath, even amongst those who genuinely wish to do well, they have employees and user generated content they can't keep up with. There is no excuse for this. Forget about the tiny span in human history that is the past 30 years. How many people died of industrial accident at the begining of the industrial revolution, how many people died because of car accidents before all the car safety and traffic laws were in place. Take that and multiply that by like a billion and that might come close to painting a fair picture of the internet. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The internet isn't special, it's just a tool, a technology that connects people. Except billions are connected, and now they can abuse and harm each other across national borders , timezones and continents and maximize their profit from it.

HN and tech-world in general is like any other industry that caused massive suffering until it was regulated. I keep making the same simple comparison of a stripper IRL vs live cam porn over the internet, and no one in this thread even wants to attack that simple example that I picked because it isn't overly sensationalized and universally accepted that laws should force strip clubs to check IDs in any country on the planet. I didn't bring up pedos, human trafficking, revenge porn and so much more in between. and that's just the sexual dramatic stuff, not the seemingly harmless stuff that is easier to brush away and dismiss.

People can see your face and make decisions when they interact with you IRL, they can't over the internet. The problem is huge and the fact that the internet has been young and unregulated does not excuse looking the other way.

I can't believe I'm defending politicians' (however ill intended) agendas against HN/tech-world. but here we are. If things progress this route, I would even cheer as everyone (self included) loses any semblance of privacy or democracy because the alternative was these masses keeping looking the other way at human suffering instead of finding sensible middle grounds, especially when the tech is there. This is insane to me! things crypto-bros (both kind!) have been trying to make main stream like zkp and homomorphic encryption and so much more can actually solve a critical fault of the internet, and the choice is to just let people suffer instead of risking a potential slipper slope.

The problem with this whole thing is the expectation of privacy online for interactions where their IRL equivalents don't have such an expectation. Even if there was no harm being done to anyone, it isn't a rational argument if you subscribe to the ideal of equal treatment under the law.

> It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...] Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong. [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/