What is the deal with the governments of the British Isles being so intrusive and privacy hostile? I'm always hearing about new laws that intrude on personal privacy while also establishing an extensive surveillance capability. What is it about the cultures of that place that make the people so accepting of such government overreach?
I’ve wondered the same thing but chalked it up to some sort of selection bias.
I always remember Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 [0] and the story of how authoritarian British schools were. I guess there some sort of contingent for making lots of rules and demanding adherence.
There’s a pretty great book called Albion’s Seed [1] by Fischer that goes into the four groups of British people that founded America. The “border” peoples of Scotland/north England were pretty anarchistic and moved to the colonies fleeing British rule. And I think there was quite a bit of rule that resulted in the people who don’t follow rules leaving Britain for the US/Australia/other colonies. So after a few hundred years, that perhaps had an effect on the type of people who stayed.
I can't really speak for them, but I keep seeing this in the US too. Individuals just don't seem to have any real recourse. These laws and systems are kafkaesque--there's just some system out there that determines the rules, and good luck finding a functioning way to push back.
Also, here's one of my favorite fairly relevant quotes:
> "We operate under the rule of law and are accountable for it. In some countries secret intelligence is used to control their people. In ours, it only exists to protect their freedoms."
Maybe this is just my inner American, but what the Irish government is doing is tyrannical. The idea that you must render your secrets to the government just seems anathema to personal liberty. This must run afoul of some human rights commitments the UK has made, no? And, the doublespeak of the quote you mentioned is absolutely repugnant.
Edit: I wrote UK government... I was mistaken and thought of Northern Ireland instead of the Republic of Ireland.
The US is not much better. Germany [0] is not much better. This seems to be a general trend right now.
If I had to guess, police has a hard time accessing anything on smartphones and PCs - which probably is a major holdback for them - and hardly anybody involved in the making of the legislature has enough technical understanding and/or political stake to defend the privacy side of things.
Most people are not accepting but there is only so much power you have over an elected government. Previous suggestions have been stopped though so you can kick up a stink sometimes and have the right results.
I also don't think it is that unique to the UK. It was a multi-national attack that broke EncroChat and the Australians breaking An0m (maybe with US help). Some countries love privacy at all costs like Germany and Scandinavia, some don't even assume they have privacy like Iran and China and those in the middle, like the UK, want to pretend they have privacy and are principled until they need to solve a crime and then it goes out the window!
English law has basically no protections against search and seizure (no posion tree doctrine). So police are used to doing as they please and politicians like it too. The mathematical impossibility of breaking hard encryption is an afront to literally hundreds of years of entitlement.
It's the "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" culture. People still trust authorities with their information and believe that nobody cares what kind of illnesses they have or what kind of porn they are into or how their body looks like or what they talked about with mates.
Look into the history. Rebellions of all kinds have been ruthlessly and brutally suppressed. The aristocracy is not as important as it used to be in Britain, but but it's still a power-centric society where those without have few choices open to them. Despite winning independence from Britain a century ago and having a clearly written constitution, Ireland kept a great deal of the legal and some of the social culture; following independence the informal power just moved towards the catholic church and (as always, everywhere) toward money.
Aside from sensitivity around the (technically correct but the status quo should always be open to question) term "British Isles", even accepting that term geographically, conflating the islands culturally demonstrates a certain level of ignorance on the subject.
It's Limerick criminal gangs and the typical "think of the children" approach of using pedophiles to limit everyone's freedom that are used in rhetoric here way more than terrorists
The Limerick gangs were more or less dealt with about a decade ago. It's the likes of the Kinahans, and possibly some of the various dissident republican groups, who are much more of a target for this bill.
Ireland is not a British isle. Irish police are unarmed and the country is not a surveillance state. However, there have been some high profile cases of murders committed by drug gangs who have used encrypted phones to put their communications beyond scrutiny / use in evidence. Ireland is a democracy and the public is perfectly able and willing to change govt if it sees fit (and it does so regularly). I think you'll find that in Ireland the people wonder WTF is wrong with the US that it could elect a cretin like Donald Trump to its highest office, denies healthcare to its citizens, tolerates vote suppression, electoral gerrymandering, mass shootings, endless racially motivated police assassinations, unlimited corporate expenditure in political campaigns etc. Ireland is fully signed up to the EU's GDPR which puts citizen's data rights on a far firmer footing than those of Americans.
>The British Isles are a group of islands in the North Atlantic off the north-western coast of continental Europe, consisting of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides and over six thousand smaller islands.
> In Ireland, the term "British Isles" is controversial, and there are objections to its usage. The Government of Ireland does not officially recognise the term, and its embassy in London discourages its use.
The term "encrypted phone" is meaningless and stupid. Do you use imessage, whatsapp, signal or any chat app that is currently thought of as "good" by tech or privacy people? Then you have an "encrypted phone". Does your phone have a lock code that is not easily hackable? Then you have an "encrypted phone".
It'd be hard to find any person using a smartphone whos phone is not "encrypted".
This is technically correct, but no context is devoid of political overtones and there's very reasonable arguments for decolonising the terminology.
"British Isles" is the widely accepted term internationally in large part due to the historical dominance of the British Empire, coupled with the ongoing influence of the British state internationally (particularly in the anglosphere). It is however not a generally preferred term within Ireland, which is worth noting alongside any technical facts about geography.
> You're so hostile to privacy laws like GDPR and we aren't etc.
You're arguing about an entirely different context. One involves private corporations, one involves the powers of the government. It's critical to make a distinction between those things, they are not the same issue at all.
Facebook, fortunately, doesn't have taxing authority, regulatory authority, law-passing authority or a private militia. I can banish Facebook from my existence, I can choose never to use their services, and I can legally use numerous options for blocking their ability to track me (and do so quite easily). Try doing that with a government that passes a very invasive law, just tell them to right piss off with their laws, refuse to obey their laws.
It's fine to argue for restrictions on privacy invasion re private corporations. However these are two separate matters to be argued, what should be allowed in the private sphere vs the public/government sphere.
