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[return to "Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach"]
1. flower+x6[view] [source] 2025-12-18 12:16:41
>>donoho+(OP)
> He warns that developers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could technically fall within the legal definition of "hostile activity" simply because their technology "make[s] it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications.

Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that.

This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on. I walk on them too. And don't use CP as a catch-all argument to insert backdoors.

Their big problem here is that previously, it was hard to find people with the same opinion as you. If you couldn't find someone in the same village who wanted to start a rebellion, it probably wouldn't happen. Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war. That is still not a strong enough reason to call road construction a hostile activity.

I'm back in Sweden after 12 years abroad. Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.

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2. chii+Oq[view] [source] 2025-12-18 14:23:02
>>flower+x6
> I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people.

they're not doing this to protect people, they're doing this to ensure there cannot be rebellion against unpopular policies. Organization is harder if all communications is monitored.

But this is how gov't get to be kept in check - the risk of "rebellion". If this risk is removed, you get authoritarian states - see north korea.

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3. 9dev+Us[view] [source] 2025-12-18 14:36:36
>>chii+Oq
I know its satisfying to think of the government as some singular nefarious entity, but the reality is far worse: There is no one in charge. It’s chaos all the way down.
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4. cjbgka+uz[view] [source] 2025-12-18 15:14:02
>>9dev+Us
There are a few people in charge, they just don’t advertise the fact. Similar how the ‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’. These both appear correct to the vast majority of people because of the Pareto distribution of outcomes, the vast majority of people experience the incompetence / no-one in charge and don’t experience the relatively tiny number of events when the competent malevolent people in charge do make their decisions. Consider if you were hosting the Jekyll Island meeting, how many people of what caliber would you invite to be there? And that’s just one of the meetings we know about. Another good one is the involvement of Bohemian Grove in selecting Ronald Regan to run for president. Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here", like many institutions, describes the opposite of what actually happens there.
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5. Kronis+T73[view] [source] 2025-12-19 08:00:07
>>cjbgka+uz
> Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence

I feel like this needs updating, sometimes it is greed, other times it also very much is malice, sometimes making those appear as incompetence or just "complex circumstances" is beneficial.

Like how you have a culture war in the US while the rich rob you blind. How you have the "us vs them" politics while checks and balances are dismantled (including accurate reporting on science), alongside social support programs. How around 2020 companies rose prices across the board while claiming supply chain issues, just for those prices to never really come down. Same with the global DRAM manufacturing and the effects across the board on RAM, GPUs and storage - the companies just don't give a shit about consumers, they are choosing this. Also how the housing market is completely unreasonable. Same with US trying to break up EU and increasingly siding with Russia.

Sometimes there's just malice or greed, even when it's not just a small group of shady people in a dark room, but rather entire social groups whose interests and ideologies just happen to align. A lot of people aren't even trying to serve the greater society in the slightest, the prevailing attitude increasingly seems to be "fuck you, I got mine". It doesn't seem entirely new, though, since the whole millennial generation largely got saddled with that economy by those who came before, what's going on is just a bit more open now. Also using US as a good example here, but obviously similar issues are on the rise in Europe as well and elsewhere.

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