U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts(washingtonpost.com) |
U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts(washingtonpost.com) |
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 was one of the big things (before Brexit) that made me realise the UK wasn't a suitable place to run a tech business.
It hasn't noticeably improved.
"Full endorsement" of the electorate isn't how representative democracy works. Given FPTP, the government got a huge majority of seats with 33.7% of the votes, but as there's not universal voting that's only 14% of the actual population, and even with those who did vote it's not clear how many people were voting "not the other lot".
Also the wider part of this order is that Apple would access to the international users data, including US customers, if I understand the article correctly.
Sounds like quite the conspiracy theory, but if the USA were not OK with this, the UK surely wouldn’t dare to take on a crown jewel in the US tech sector, potentially causing them serious problems.
Hence why Trump was cheering on Starmer the other day, despite all that has gone on between them.
Americans need to wake up and realise their state uses uk/israel to do what they don't want to be seen to be doing.
as a side note, its really baffling what this capability would actually provide for? Any serious criminal isn't using icloud backup or even an iPhone in the first place. So this is just a shit outcome for the general population.
If this goes through, I look forward to the news of the world expose on some cabinet members personal details
UK Law Enforcement can suck my dick.
Encryption works people. Use it.
And the next day this or blocking DeepSeek (in Italy).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975170
They're not exactly the same, but you should have similar feelings about forcing a company to hand over data to researchers and forcing a company to install a back door for law enforcement.
All of the sudden people start caring, acting like they never had the chance to regulate their OEM of choice. No, you get exactly what you paid for. You trust Apple, don't you? They're a prestige company, they'd never sell you out. Probably. Oops[0].
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
Here we are, though, at the point where the government overreach for these "beacons of democracy" such as US and UK do this often and by design and we're all supposed to pretend "thing are fine, trust us". Next they'll push some other overreach using children, terrorism, drugs or some other usual excuse and people will defend it pretending the government has good intentions and largely works for the people.
Why is it tho ? The government has something to hide ? i mean it's complete bullshit, citizen have the right to privacy and government has the obligation of transparency and being accountable to its citizens.
When did the UK turned into a middle east dictatorship ?
> Google has enforced default encryption for Android phone backups since 2018. When asked by The Post whether any government had requested a backdoor, Google spokesman Ed Fernandez did not provide a direct answer but suggested none exist: "Google cannot access Android end-to-end encrypted backup data, even with a legal order," he stated.
That is absolutely laughable. If the uk government couldn't access google data, they would have ordered google the same thing they did with apple.
Apple theoretically can't access their user data when e2e encryption is enabled yet the uk government doesn't care. how does that differ from google ?
once again, if you want your data to be safe from google, apple, and the others you got to avoid all cloud and resort to use good old hard drive with encryption.
the only ones getting fcked are once again the average people who don't have much to hide in the first place, the pedophiles and terrorist they are much more aware than the old fart at the government on how to stay hidden.
(I suppose the silver lining is that Starmer is merely sidling towards Trump as his new best mate rather than the full-throated slobbering that Johnson/Truss/Sunak would have given him.)
[0] I know this is primarily the fault of the last lot but this shower of onions haven't done anything to roll it back and/or clarify WTF is going on.
"No."
I'd probably categorize that more as "declining to halt" rather than "refusing to halt", AFAIK the US government doesn't have an actual law/mandate/whatever for non-governmental organizations on that front.
If he's antagonising Trump it's for a reason. Perhaps to avoid showing weakness by being too keen.
> After the Dutch and Canadian police compromised their server in 2016, EncroChat turned into a popular alternative among criminals for its security-oriented services in 2017–2018. The founders and owners of EncroChat are not known. According to Dutch journalist Jan Meeus, a Dutch organized crime gang was involved and financed the developers.
It all begs the question, what else have they requested, and of those which requests were accepted secretly?
Truly a pathetic example of a democracy.
I think Apple has a very short window for a powerful response here. It should be re-using the famous Pirate Bay wording for maximum effect.
But Apple has a massive history of complying with government data requests all over the world. They care not for user privacy one bit, and so this request is not that unusual for them.
iCloud Backup is not end to end encrypted. iCloud Photos is not end to end encrypted.
Apple can read all of your iMessages and see all of your photos.
The governments where they operate can compel them to turn over this data. They can and do. Often.
Operationally this doesn’t really change much.
DO NOT SPREAD FUD.
If you could be bothered to spend two microseconds on a search engine, you would find this[1] which states IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH :
For users who turn on Advanced Data Protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption rises from 14 to 23 and includes iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec973254c5f/...
When you go to an Apple store and buy and use an iPhone, as millions do, you are prompted to create an Apple Account and log in. iCloud and iCloud Backup are automatically and silently enabled. The device automatically runs non-e2ee backups nightly.
This is how almost every iPhone on Earth runs. Most people don’t even know the feature exists. Even amongst techies that know about it, almost nobody has it enabled.
It can just order to a third party do so. Wait, why does a third party have access to peoples' private communications. That is the Apple design. The company wants people to use their servers.
If you take the information at face value, they don't.
The government is mandating them to actively infiltrate into people's private communications.
Cloaking mass privacy violations under "operational matters" is the most doublespeak bullshit I've ever heard.
If you do not control the keys and the software that controls the keys, then you are not using end to end encryption.
In my honest opinion, in this specific context UK should be treated with the same scrutiny we treat China.
Through Five Eyes the US agencies could, via the UK, get global access to iCloud accounts
No need to change US law
Anyone with a fundamental understanding of online privacy and security would encrypt any files prior to uploading them to the cloud rendering any back doors and access to those files useless and toothless.
I dont use any of these services. I have never understood the thinking around uploading your private life to some server in the cloud when they are more secure on an external hard drive at home.
This is a well worn path for the CIA gather dirt without needing to break any rules on monitoring US citizens.
"If you want to sell phones in our country, you have to give us access to anyone we say is a criminal using your phones in any country".
"You are asking us to break the law in those other countries."
"Do you want to sell phones in our country, or not? We know you'll blink first."
(Will Apple blink? I don't know. But I am confident that the UK government is filled with people who assume they will).
I use online services and sync, but my life is so boring (and data breaches have exposed so much) that a disaster that destroys my house and all backups is far more likely that harm from government or private snooping on my cloud files.
I know we’re supposed to stand on principle and make data storage choices as if today’s cat photo were evidence of being the real JFK assassin, but I don’t have the energy.
I agree that cloud services cannot be trusted to do encryption within their clients, but on platforms like iOS it's difficult to do automated backups using independent encryption. It's also quite difficult not to accidentally enable backups to these services because the setup flow for every phone guides you to hitting the "upload everything I do to Apple/Google".
To Apple's credit, while they normally store a copy of the encryption key, making most cloud encryption entirely useless, they do offer setting a custom key at least. GDrive and OneDrive sure don't.
iOS allows you to perform encrypted backups to your local PC or Mac out of the box.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...
A phone has to at least tell the nearest tower that it's within range so that the tower can know to send it messages. After that, when it get's a message it sends some sort of acknowledgement. In theory anyone can pick up those messages with a phased array or set of directional antennas and get a directional fix on the phone.
psychopathy is a mental disease who impair people to control their impulses/defected judgment; often these are permanent personality traits, which either will let them sit in a prison for the rest of their lives depending on what they did or they will be liberated if they get caught with a high chance of another incidence... search for papers/work from Kent Kiehl if you are interested in this type of stuff
I learned only much later that her husband was prosecuted for fraud related to government funds. So she had a good reason to have a dumbphone.
It's anecdotal evidence, but still.
You are of very low opinion of people, probably assuming that you are smarter because you are some kind of IT guy.
And you are likely wrong.
Depends on your threat model. If someone unofficial wanted at what you're doing, they'd likely find it easier to go after your home data than what you have in iCloud -- particularly if using Advanced Data Protection for iCloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756
Also, ask the folks in Los Angeles how those external hard drives at home are working out for them in the fires. There are many types of threats.
So if you ever wonder how they access those WhatsApp messages, when you think that they would be end-to-end encrypted, reality is something else.
Meanwhile, the amount of local news arrests for people getting busted for uploading CSAM to online platforms like Google and Apple is exponentially increasing.
The average "criminal" is an idiot.
Even people concerned with security who know a little seem to be terrible at it.
A local protest group in my area was passing around an image with security tips. They were hilariously bad, suggestions based on very confused understandings of risk. These people weren’t criminals necessarily, but they were motivated and concerned and somehow just terrible at basic security.
What's the inverse of survivor bias?
Most of the time, people become terrorists, criminals or child abusers because they're stupid, not because they're smart.
There is the possibility that there is a great deal more crime being commuted by capable super criminals who understand the nuances of security .... but I'm more of a subscriber to the theory that for "most" crime, it's a lot of stupid people.
Does she? Law enforcement can wiretap and track dumbphones just as easily as smart phones. The lack of encrypted calling/texting options even make it easier for law enforcement. If she's trying to hide more fraud, the dumbphone isn't helping her. And of course if she is trying to hide fraud from law enforcement, she probably shouldn't be doing the fraud in the first place.
There are good reasons for using dumbphones (smartphones distract, and it's having a serious impact on everyone these days) but avoiding being prosecuted isn't one.
And Apple argued to the UK Parliament when the relevant law was being enacted that it violates the right to privacy confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights, which other countries will still be bound by even if the UK follows through on its occasional threat to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The UK doesn't have the geopolitical clout it once did, especially not after Brexit.
Aye.
But (1) I don't think the UK government really understands that, and (2) for intelligence operations, they might still have enough.
Everyone else has the exact same dichotomy of simultaneously wanting all the computers safe from other hackers while also hacking everything themselves, and many also want the added extra of guaranteed citizen's right to privacy, so legal fights like this are advantageous to most nations: all the other countries watching this get to have their cake (they can spy on encrypted comms) while eating it too (in this metaphor, when Apple is found out, they get to punish Apple and pretend to be above such things).
I also don't know which way this will go, and indeed this is a big part of Apple's brand.
A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.
The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.
Every encryption backdoor is a huge vulnerability. Even if we somehow ensure that the powers-that-be remain entirely trustworthy (something that, historically, we can't even manage for a century), they're not the only people who'll have access to the backdoor. It's not possible to make an encryption backdoor that only authorised parties can use: as they say, the laws of mathematics do not respect the laws of Australia.
Therefore you know this is not about chasing the bad guys. It's about keeping the Average Joe under the thumb.
I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth.
I'd argue that the opposite is probably true, people who think that crime pays are less smart and more impulsive than the average person, and hence less likely to think about things like this.
There absolutely is a balance between Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime. Without undermining the former, I'm astounded how HN discounts the latter 100%. It is real.
Here's Apple admitting that they just bugged the Push Notification server so the NSA could read them without MITMing anything: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Suffice to say, they don't even have to backdoor the encryption to give the UK what they want. iOS users are like fish in a barrel, if you force some insecure paradigm on them they can either adopt it or leave.
> Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon.
Where does this problem start? Is it a basic education thing that valuing one's own and others' privacy needs to be taught to kids from a young age?
For instance, in the meetings in which these ideas are proposed, why are they not considered a serious, fireable offence, like bringing up racist or sexist comments?
As a solution to never have unencrypted files in iCloud.
I follow the same procedure with my Android phone, no google cloud.
BTW anything I upload to Dropbox is encrypted first.
Apple says "Encrypted backups can include information that unencrypted backups don't" however the list they give is non-exhaustive. You might find yourself disappointed when trying to restore a non-encrypted backup that you've encrypted yourself in a disaster scenario.
I thought we had grown ups running the show now. Clearly that was optimistic.
1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 says you can change your country to opt-out of GCBD.
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42631386 says "iCloud accounts registered outside of China are not affected."
We have had a number of bad laws over the last ten years that have entrenched state surveillance and presumption of guilt.
The only party I can see taking a principled stance on civil liberties is Reform UK, whose policy document states:
> A British Bill of Rights
> Our freedoms must be codified and guaranteed. Never again can our entire country be locked down on shoddy evidence and lies. Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.
https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachme...
Recent polls show Reform is currently the most popular party. So there is hope.
- that’s silly - they can’t do that legally - this makes no technical sense - this is a bad idea - this will never happen
The entire globe becomes Xi Jinpeng’s China with American Characteristics after the iCloud encryption system is neutered and a court warrant is no longer needed.
China is not asking to see other countries’ iCloud data.
> The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-e...
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology...
> The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (c. 25) (nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter)[1] is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which received royal assent on 29 November 2016.[2][3] Its different parts came into force on various dates from 30 December 2016.[4] The Act comprehensively sets out and in limited respects expands the electronic surveillance powers of the British intelligence agencies and police.[4] It also claims to improve the safeguards on the exercise of those powers.[5]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
Not just "see also." Your link is the original reporting.
Without journalists and organizations like these doing hard, expensive work like this no one -- not even on HN -- would know about it.
It's a shame that the link being used for the HN entry is to a blog re-writing other people's work, and not doing any of that work or sharing any of that expense themselves.
Correct link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-e...
No, I don't care if there's a paywall. Credit where credit is due is something your mom should have taught you when you were five.
1: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876174862747930717?lang=en
iMessage is barely used in the UK, WhatsApp is the default messaging platform here
I had a look at the stats though and you're probably correct about WhatsApp being default, although we do have a surprisingly diverse and competitive messenger market:
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/997945/most-used-messenge...
Blue bubble is messages you sent via iMessage.
All incoming messages are grey, regardless of whether they were sent to you via SMS or iMessage.
DOGE was recently unable to obtain data on Americans (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musks-doge-deal...), maybe related...
They had read/write data for a few days before being denied access https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-...
Does Apple lose much, in future revenue if people buy out of the ecology in the UK market? At scale, sure. But then again no. It's a 3.8 trillion dollar company. This is almost noise.
I don't think there will be a rush to the door. Set against overall revenue targets, they can comply and weather the storm.
America used to push the rest of the world to give their people those rights. Used to....
I felt an obligation to excessively site stuff here, because I find it bemusing anybody in tech can take such articles or topics at face value.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction#By_the_U...
If Apple can be compelled to keep shut about Push Notifications being bugged, who knows what else they're obligated to keep under the covers. Caveat emptor.
In some way I find the Chinese system preferable in that they're completely transparent about spying and domineering the companies within the country. The only difference in the US is we actively lie about and engage in all this utterly ridiculous LARPing that makes anybody with half a head on their shoulder just despise every player involved.
About the time a country has secret courts and is forcing private entities to lie to others publicly, something has gone very wrong with the direction of the country.
Even if you ignore the above points, Apple's software is closed source. You cannot change OS or install any unapproved app on your own phone. Apple phones are Orwellian's wet dream. If people still trust bigtech then society is doomed.
This is completely false. It has been shown time and time again that Apple will bend to whatever data requests the US government ask for.
You may think they care about your privacy, because they tell you they do. But they are legally bound to say that. Every surveilance program they have ever been part of has had a legal requirement to lie publicly about its existance. Then when it becomes public through a leak, they are able to say 'Sorry we lied, we had to by law'.
Heres just one example: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
Naive implication. They're authoritarian henchmen.
If you're holding out on Apple, a company that has proven to betray every principle they claim to stand for, to defend privacy when money is on the line, then you've been fooled. I don't know how many times Hacker News has to say it before you chumps learn, but Apple is not a privacy-committed company. Being able to point at whitepapers is not the same as knowing how your device functions.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
I should emphasize that 'I personally don't care'. I find it more interesting that people believe there is some safety in Apple products because their marketing says so.
When I was younger, I used to care about these people getting taken advantage of. Today, I wonder how I can replicate the formula. Sorry pals, Apple did it and people were happy about it. I'll make people happy too, its a Noble lie... err Paternal lie :)
Which is not to say I approve of more surveillance. Just that surveillance of convenient modes of communication (iMessage) is useful to serious crime fighting.
That's a very bold assumption after EncroChat and SkyECC.
From what I understand, the spy agencies have ways of obtaining your private information that don't necessarily involve blanket requirements to access all users' data (e.g. creative ways of injecting malware into specific people's devices). But those approaches don't scale, of course. And they shouldn't need to.
Hate to tell ya, those aren't fireable offenses at the highest offices anymore either.
It starts with UK citizens buying iPhones and expecting their data to be private at all.
My comment applies just as much to the people working at Apple and Google as to the folks in the UK government.
However, since 2016 the party almost exclusively shifted focus to opposing Brexit... which is ironic for a party that describes itself as "Liberal Democrats," trying to overthrow a public referendum (the strongest form of democracy)
The party seems to have lost its way, sadly.
What’s this about? Is it some mad “covid was a hoax” thing?
Reform UK believe that the purported efficacy of the mRNA vaccines at preventing transmission was massively exaggerated (we now know it was).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Reform UK believe that the detrimental side effects of lockdown policy outweighed the benefits of lockdown policy (again, there's evidence to support this view)
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
"While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
We need more voices that are willing to state these truths in Parliament IMO.
Side A abuses (legal, governmental) power, and instead of "lynching" them for that, we turn the issue into "this will become bad only because of side B will do the same". To me it looks like someone supports side A, and wants to limit the "badness" of whatever they did, but still can't support the thing, so they find the way out by claiming that the other side will do something bad with that data, as if the collecting the data (chats,...) isn't bad enough by itself.
I understand your analogy with friends and facebook, and explaining that stuff to your grandma in this way would probably work... maybe even better if you used "your neighbor Sally works for the government, she could read your chats too, do you really want that?"... but on a technical "forum", it (to me) gives off very politically biased vibes.
From an account of 30k karma I expected better.
I also suspect international social structures could play a big role. In the UK many people have friends & family that emigrated to iMessage counties like the US & Australia. But many have links to WhatsApp countries like India or even Telegram countries in Eastern Europe.
From forums of tech experts.
I do not think this attempt by the authorities will be any useful, while it would initially work... well these guys may not be hackers but are not idiots and over time you will get your average baddies become tech-savvy enough to circumvent this.
I think it's a case of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/
People here work at the level of things like RowHammer, normal people don't think past the idea that a padlock icon on the screen makes them safe.
I think it's more likely to get broad support when framed as us vs. them where "us" is normal working people regardless of political affiliation and "them" is our government elites trying to spy on us.
If it's associated too strongly with a specific party it alienates too many people to ever get mass support and become a fundamental value that "everyone" agrees on
The current ones are already abusing their power, and the other one might hypothetically do something, if and when and if at all.
This is like Alice making it legal and then punching you in the face and instead of you "punching back", you say "this is fine, but Bob is bad, because if he gets voted in, he'll punch harder".
I assume that instead of educating me on how the backups are in a user unreadable format, you chose to make a snide remark and leave me to guess the truth.
Why would anyone trust a backup they cannot read themselves in an emergency?
I don't know of any UK plan that charges.
It doesn't protect against every attack (eg. Stingray or evil maid) but it absolutely would protect you from a situation like the one in the OP. Breaking your encryption can only work if the OEM controls your phone more than you do.
I frankly don't expect the average Apple user to abandon their ecosystem, sunken costs and all that. But I do expect them to reconsider their unconditional support for a company that fights for the right to surveil them. LineageOS is hard to use, but as someone that already got most my apps off F-Droid it's honestly a cinch.
Your comment makes it sound like they're all about research, but they also want to ditch human rights and the world health organisation? This conflict of logic makes me think there's probably more to it than just research and doing good in the world. Can it be that they speak of e.g. lockdowns having been bad based on that ReformUK voters were particularly badly affected by that policy and that this study after the fact found that, indeed, they did more harm than good? Ignoring that this wasn't necessarily knowable at the time, but it reflects badly on the government to have made a mistake with hindsight and so they can gain votes since they weren't in power back then and thus the fallacy is to think they'd have known better?
Okay, let's check the paper.
> Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.
I must conclude, as a party dedicated to the science, that Reform UK therefore would be on board with the above mitigations, if they are genuinely interested in pursuing at least the simplest / cheapest effective mitigations for Covid.
Was that the case?
Could you name an extremist policy that Reform have proposed?
- Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (joining the hallowed company of Russia and Belarus!)
- leaving the World Health Organisation
- get rid of net-zero climate targets, replacing them with fast-tracked approval for more North Sea oil & gas licenses and fracking
- public enquiry on “Vaccine Harms”
2. The WHO is notorious for failures in policy e.g. Covid response, bends to political pressure from China (e.g. not respecting Taiwan as an independent entity), and is dependent on private donors like Bill Gates which means they have undue influence. A 2021 probe into the WHO found its staff were involved in sexual abuse during an Ebola outbreak in Congo. There are plenty of reasons for leaving it. There's nothing extreme about leaving the WHO.
3. We absolutely should get the oil and gas we need from our own reserves, rather than buying it from despotic regimes and shipping it half way round the world at great ecological expense. There's nothing "extreme" about using our own natural resources.
4. We know now that there were many serious side effects from the mRNA injections and that the contracts granting lifetime immunity to the manufacturers for harm were extremely suspicious. This is a totally novel form of medical intervention, administered to a large population in a hurry, under intense political pressure. There's nothing "extreme" about an enquiry on mRNA injection harms. What are we afraid of? Uncovering the truth?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10022421/
"CV events such as thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, stroke, and myocarditis frequently occur with the mRNA vaccines studied. A significant number of studies included in our review reported BNT162b2 events, which presses the need to conduct more research into the CV implications of mRNA‐1273 (Moderna) vaccine."
My father doesn't and so pays PAYG rates when he uses his. Which probably makes sense for him, given his infrequent use pattern.
It is disingenous at best to claim that leaving the ECHR means that the UK will abandon or downgrade human rights, unless you have detailed insider information on the proposed British Bill of Rights, and if you're in a position to analyse the relative strength of the ECHR vs the BBR.
I am confident that a new-found ability to send rapists and murderers out of the UK and back to their home country will IMPROVE the human rights of UK citizens.
Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy, especially electronic privacy, almost nobody cares when "we will only allow a small number of agents to use this for imminent terrorist danger" inevitably turns to "we will let any random council worker casually pull up every website you've been to with no warrant"
Someone's encrypted files should be regarded to be in the same category as material they memorized in their brain. Off limits.
Find some other way to get evidence about their wrongdoing to convict them.
I hold neither of the extreme views, and frankly I am baffled by anyone in either of them.
Even in situations where citizen rights do “get in the way” of convicting the guilt, that is the price we pay to not be thrown in jail for crimes we didn’t commit. Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” He also said “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order... and the like.”
I'm not saying, based on that, you throw away privacy rules. But to not even acknowledge that there is a conflict is IMO insane.
Reading through this thread, I get the sense that the desire for absolute privacy stems from a perception of the government as basically another mafia - a ruthless, unprincipled organisation that will exploit any weakness in you, just because. Maybe that's the root of the difference. I'm lucky enough to have never lived in such a country. Sure, I care about government accountability, there will always be bad actors, and governments in general aren't always super-competent, but I believe fundamentally, governments in places I have lived are not evil. They aren't another mafia I need a firewall against.
If you have evidence that he was doing something bad, prosecute him. You must have evidence, because you couldn’t know he was doing something bad based off these chats you can’t read.
>You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators.
So charge them with conspiracy or RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations).
>you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.
How can you possibly know that? If you have evidence of crimes, use that to prosecute. If you don’t have evidence, then you don’t know crimes were committed. Regardless, you don’t even know if these encrypted chats contain anything incriminating.
Government is not another mafia, they are a group of people who are flawed. “Good” governments have laws protecting the rights of citizens against individuals within government. That is like saying that we don’t need defense attorneys because prosecutors are good people and wouldn’t bring a case against an innocent person, or would never bend/break the rules to get a conviction. We have them to protect the rights of the innocent and the guilty.
It's no good having people arguing for "privacy for me but not for thee", which is what it will boil down to. Ultimately authoritarians will use anything which gives them influence and control, with digital privacy violations being one of the easiest to rationalise (no violence, no physical theft).
So I don't see it as worthwhile trying to include such individuals in such a consensus. It's like trying to include foxes in a discussion about how we should best secure hen houses.
Unfortunately that just means there's a lot more sticky work untangling the kind of tribalistic politics we find ourselves in today.
That's very clearly not what I wrote. You can demand information this way, not a confession... People in the UK generally have a legal obligation to answer any questions the court has, unless they are themselves the accused. There are a small few other exceptions.
Just because UK law allows compelled disclosure doesn’t make it right—it makes it a bad law. It creates a self-incrimination loophole, shifting the burden of proof onto individuals instead of the state. Leading to erosion of due process and a presumption of guilt, forcing people to either comply or face punishment, even when no crime has been proven. Civil rights advocates have lambasted this law.
So I ask: Do you believe it to be balanced?
Using flawed laws to justify more erosion of privacy only deepens the problem.
(Although I was able to access the article in full on the original URL)
The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor.
It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just move it somewhere else with encryption. Honest UK consumers are the one's getting the shitty end of the stick because we're about to loose protection from criminals.
Daft waste of time.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3lhl...
As such, any outcome where this is enforced will be a compromise.
https://support.apple.com/en-bh/guide/certifications/apc37da...
Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
The Peter Principle writ large.
I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job.
Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check.
Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check.
Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check.
That's where the UK is.
But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.
Agreed.
> Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/uk-demands-apple...
The A5 cipher used in GSM came from France, but supposedly the Brits were also happy to have it be weak.
I wonder if you would get anarchist riots until the law was removed. Many of the young with an expensive bricked iPhone (or parents whose kid's iPad was disabled) would probably side with Apple over already unpopular politicians...
Three weeks ago, I would have agreed with you.
Then Tim Cook wrote a check for $1,000,000.00 to help pay for Donald Trump's inauguration party.†
In spite of what they led us to believe over the last couple of decades, Tim Cook and Apple are no different than any of the other tech companies genuflecting before the new emperor, whose stated goals are the opposite of the "mission, vision and values" lies we were fed by the tech industry.
† In case you (or anyone else) missed it: https://variety.com/2025/biz/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-donates...
Apple has shareholders, so no it can't (or more precisely, Tim Cook can't).
As for Apple, their daily/hourly/whatever fines might be less than cost of a major ad campaign if they were to buy that publicity directly. Sounds like a good deal for them to refuse to honor the request.
I suppose there are people in the camp advocating for back doors who still think it’s worth the tremendous downsides to be able to catch that group of criminals (there are certainly plenty of idiot criminals), but anybody can just use plain GPG emails for free, or deploy some open source encrypted chat server on a $20 a month cloud instance… and I assume operators in places like Russia or China won’t mind hosting easy services for less nerdy criminals willing to pay in crypto.
This appears to be majority of them if Brian Krebs is to be trusted. Very few have proper OPSEC, fewer still are disciplined enough to prevent cross contaminating their virtual identities.
Even if you keep your communications airtight, boneheaded decisions when they move the money from cyberspace into meatspace are quite common: people living way beyond their means, 22 y/o's buying $200K+ cars without proper income records get caught quickly once people start looking.
First, these are the same thing.
Second, ADP is already off by default so approximately nobody uses it. It is irrelevant from a privacy standpoint whether or not they offer it.
Further, as all other forms of e2ee, it makes you responsible for the encryption keys.
As a user on the platform I am quite happy it is offered. Considering that these days it is quite difficult not to have a mobile device associated with “you” (you open links sent to “you” on your mobile device? consider that device compromised from privacy perspective), id rather it be on the platform with stronger protections.
Although it's worth wondering why anyone would use any type of corporate cloud backup, anyway. Certainly if you had anything worth hiding, you would disable that first. That just makes this whole endeavor that much more dubious.
This. Whether it is an app to install on your phone or desktop or simply a website to use. People who need encryption to make sure their communication is private will _easily_ find ways around any kind of government snooping.
Sufficiently advanced "escalating fines until they comply" is indistinguishable from "putting them out of business".
How could this even be enforced if Apple pulls out cloud services of the UK ?
It's such a ridiculous request, the British Intelligence agencies must be bored coming up with new ways to make Apple look good.
No, that does not suggest none exists, it only says they don’t have access to it. They could have chosen or have been ordered to give the keys to the government agency but not keep one themselves. I’m not saying that’s likely, just that it’s important to not take these statements as saying more than they do. They wouldn’t hesitate to use “technically correct” as a defence and you have to take that into account.
As mentioned in the article, Salt Typhoon and the recency of this request by the UK. At this point they should know better.
My pet theory is anytime the US wants to do something illegal under US law, they simply ask the UK to do it and vice versa. That's why Salt Typhoon isn't and never will be a lesson learned.
[1] Susan Landau and Alan Rozenshtein Debate End-to-End Encryption (Again!) https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-daily--susan-la...!)
edit: typo
Just old people making bad laws about stuff they don't understand - or are straight up citizen hostile, sometimes hard to tell which it is.
I was wondering whether this is about Advanced Data Protection, which encrypts almost all data end-to-end on iCloud. It’s only later in this report that it gets into this key detail:
> At issue is cloud storage that only the user, not Apple, can unlock. Apple started rolling out the option, which it calls Advanced Data Protection, in 2022.
Before stating this, the article says:
> Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said.
This means Apple would be prevented from providing Advanced Data Protection to users in the U.K.
Not making Advanced Data Protection available is made worse by this requirement:
> One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security.
Apple can appeal, but is forced to comply meanwhile (until the appeal is heard) anyway:
> Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.
I believe we should increasingly turn to steganography as a way to ensure our privacy (obviously, combined with encryption). Something that provides simple plausible deniability but lots of data to use as a carrying medium should become the default selection (like "personal videos" — a great use for our phone cameras to build an extensive collection), so even if "identified" as potential carrier for the data, it would be impossible to convict someone over it.
I can imagine a scheme where your secret passphrase defines what bits of data in a video to use to carry actual data and yet avoid changing the output too much. Obviously, coming with a non-reversible algorithm that takes into account different lossy video encoding schemes is non-trivial, though I am sure there is some (plenty?) prior art to build off of.
In the US, after Salt Typhoon compromised telecom networks—including court-authorized wiretap systems—the FBI has now (somewhat reluctantly, I think) started advising government officials to use end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp to protect themselves. [1]
I think the UK government is running a bit behind wrt Encryption.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/17/nx-s1-5223490/text-messaging-...
But the counter-argument here is: if the civilian E2E apps had also/already been backdoored, they'd be entirely out of options now.
> So much for personal liberties. I'd like to give Labour the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a holdover from the last government knowing how fast the civil service actually works but given the Tory 3.0 plan they are going with I wouldn't put it passed them.
>We didn't vote for this.
You very much did vote for this, you voted for Labour under Keir Starmer and he did not particularly hide his being tory-lite. If one is surprised by this they must not have paid any attention before voting.
Labour was behind:
- forced key disclosure (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000), still in force
- 72 day detention without charge (Terrorism Act 2006), defeated before it became an Act
- national identity register and mandatory id cards (Identity Cards Act 2006), ripped up by the next Tory government
- various attempts at removal of ancient right to trial by jury (partially successful)
The US may suck every now and then, but the US constitution is one of the best things in human history. It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
The only way to prevent this is to avoid this huge, massive, centralisation. Of course, Apple wouldn’t want this.
If we had lots of smaller scale hosting providers around the world (potentially dozens per country), the scope of attacking each one with such an order is much smaller.
"The USA fought a war in part because they did not like the use of general writs of assistance to allow agents of the British King to search peoples houses and papers where their suspicion chanced to fall. The UK lost that war so no way!"
I wouldn't characterize the rest of the world as not obsessed, really.
From the article, discussing the idea of Apple stopping offering encryption in the U.K.
“Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States”
You could probably make an ECHR argument about it, but even Germany who are most paranoid about Stasi-like behavior have some sort of rights carveout for law enforcement purposes.
Yes, German law enforcement does have a rights carveout, but not nearly as big of one as in the UK (or the US).
/j
Looking at the market size that might be a decision that Apple is willing to make as it would most likely be a temporary stick. The government can spin it anyway they want, but Apple devices do not work basically at all without the deep integration of their services. A geoblock would effectively mean UK citizens would be left with unusable devices and I can't see the resulting outrage being directed exclusively at Apple.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out for sure.
Someone else here said something spot on for me, we’re all focusing on how bat sh*t this is because it’s global without even considering how human privacy obligations are just ignored.
Humans have a right to privacy, feels unbelievably pretentious and privileged to even say that. But it’s still true
I wonder if this means that Apple would ultimately take the same approach that they have in China, where the iCloud data and services are entirely localized within China and allows the Chinese government unrestricted access.
I'm still missing how this could be enforced ? To my layman understanding, this reads the same as if China said : "Meta, Tesla, Valve etc has entities in China therefore we get to see all data they store in the EU and the US.
The UK has Zero jurisdiction in Ireland for example where a lot of EU data may be stored.
This all seems very similar to RIM and the aftermath of the riots in the UK. The backdoors became too obvious for customers to ignore. Did not go well for RIM in the market afterwards.
We know they collude with US intelligence serviceUS
I am not a lawyer, but I think that this would be illegal under EU privacy law.
Frankly, the arrogance is appalling.
I suppose this is _good_ but more competent and well funded groups out of Israel, Israeli military complex, Cyprus don’t need to “ask” for a back door.
Honest question, how Apple is doing it in China? Maybe the exact same scheme will work for UK.
The UK has reportedly served Apple a document called a technical capability notice. It’s a criminal offense to even reveal that the government has made a demand. Similarly, if Apple did cede to the UK’s demands then it apparently would not be allowed to warn users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure.
For example (a simplistic one), you can have a statement like "we do not have any backdoors in our software" added to your legal documents (TOS, etc). But once a backdoor is added, you are compelled by your lawyers to remove that statement. So you aren't disclosing that you have added a backdoor. You're just updating your legal documents to make accurate claims.
One would think this runs afoul of other laws though, truth in advertising and similar.
Its such a legal minefield, and the UKs request borders on violating the sovereignty of other nations I can't see Apple complying, but maybe that's hopium talking.
The whole definition of "end-to-end encrypted" is that only the two ends have the keys. If anyone or anything other than the two ends (the one sending and the one receiving) has access to the keys, it's not end-to-end encrypted.
And when their key leaks, it’s as good as no encryption, but still end-to-end encrypted.
It doesn't stop being end-to-end when you add another end. We often do group chats that way.
Or you can create a side-channel and send al the data there. That would stop it from being end-to-end.
No, they would have had custody of the keys. Meaning it would still be true they cannot (now) access the data.
If law enforcement won't catch criminal even if you had them all the details, evidence, witnesses, then average person thinks there laws are dead anyway as there is no one competent to enforce them.
I can educate people but it always comes back to "I've not got anything to hide". What are we suppose to do, go out to the streets and protest? Start a petition, right to a PM who has no idea what encryption is?
Mentioning Linux to my family opens a can of worms. We are naive to think protesting actually changes something, it's old fashion. Those with power just don't care so unless people attack with their wallets nothing will come from.
It's not 1995 so unless you have £ for lobbying surrounded by people in suites there is nothing public of any nation can do against anyone in power.
Most day to day complaints are they don't prosecute enough, often related to the bastard that snatched your phone. We have approximately zero people sitting in jail for failing to decrypt and similar.
>This is a very obvious setup for future totalitarianism.
No it really isn't. If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writing books like 1984 and bombing nazis.
* I have nothing to hide, I don't care
* Oh come on, our government doesn't care what I'm up to
* The UK will never be totalitarian. I'm not scared of the government
* The UK civil service is incompetent and could never pull this off (fair point, although I worry about the safety of my personal data in the hands of such people)
Let's not forget we had a hard-left (Corbyn) socialist regime come close to power, whose cabinet members called for "direct action" against political opponents, just a few years ago.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/watch-john-mcdonnell-s-c...
I don't think people realise how quickly things could go wrong with these surveillance mechanisms in place, and spiteful, authoritarian politicians taking power.
In most cases it requires a court order as well.
Do you have a source for that assertion?
Participants spy on each other's citizens on the other's behalf and share data, to avoid the legality of doing so to their own citizens.
Overall i agree with you, it is really disheartening. That being said, i've made progress with my family on valuing privacy and the dangers of surveillance. I think people might be changing their minds slowly but still lots of work to do.
A breakthrough with my sisters was when abortion was threatened here in the states. Mentioned to them that it would be easy for authorities to enforce abortion punishments by subpoenaing data from menstruation cycle tracker apps. This kind of "clicked" for them and they became more open to the other parts (not given ratukan or whatever their purchase history, etc. etc.)
Now let’s say that some Republican Senators and Representatives were ethically opposed to but then threatened to be primaried and President Musk said he would throw all of his money behind a potential opponent, how long do you think it would take a law to be passed?
Even without a law, we already see that Cook will willingly bend a knee to Trump as will Google.
Right now in my home state the governor was trying to get a law passed banning Western Union from allowing illegal immigrants from sending money overseas.
I think we are perhaps the lowest point ever in terms of anti-surveillance efforts. There seems to be bipartisan effort among many (most?) western governments that the government should have unfettered access to all data, regardless of any reasonable expectation of privacy.
Encryption seems barely tolerated these days. Governments are insisting on backdoors, they are making it illegal in some cases for companies to even discuss what is going on or that monitoring is happening.
We barely know what is going on with the programs and efforts that get leaked to the media, much less the programs that operate in total secret.
If you voted for this Tory-lite government, then you can stop voting for any future Tory-lite governments. If you did not, there's not much you can do in practice without devoting your life to it.
The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson (appointed by the Labour Attorney General), warned against "publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So, if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense [incitement to racial hatred]."
He added further, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."
This isn’t “Tory-lite,” this is Labour.
Sources: https://freespeechunion.org/labours-war-on-free-speech/
This is Hobson's choice as far as I can see.
I don't think there's anyone you could currently vote for that wouldn't do this.
If you agree that Brexit happened under the Tories and not Labour, then we can also agree that THIS order is happening under the newly elected "Labour Party" and not the "Tories", or so-called "Tory-lite" names.
It's completely pointless trying to remove accountability of this government's illogical actions and then to immediately resort to blaming the previous government for bad decisions like this one.
Just admit that this is under the Labour government.
You have to change the view of the country as a whole, and for generations the U.K. has been a country of curtain twitchers.
What lead to to believe that? The Conservatives and Conservative-Continuity governments both agree that our data simply must be in the hands of the police, DEFRA, and your local council.
RIPA will never be repealed and only strengthened.
It's always through the appearance of good intentions and a public that pushes for whatever narrative they're fed that they normalize this.
People love and want more of this, not less.
And stop making excuses for parties that don't (i.e. Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives).
At the moment, the UK public (and media) considers it a sport to disparage and smear parties like Reform, whose leaders want to shrink the power and over-reach of the state.
We are so concerned with appearing virtuous and internationally generous, we cannot be seen to align with a party that wants to put UK citizens first (border security? deporting dangerous criminals back to their home nation? gasp, how could we be so ghastly!)
This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
The problem is that there are none.
The correct assessment of all these political parties is that by default, they all cannot be trusted. Especially both labour and the conservatives.
> This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
Yes. The second problem is that the United Kingdom is incapable to changing itself historically and is fundamentally destined to never be open to change.
Sadly, the EU is trying very hard and very persistently to pass the Chat Control bill. So far the EU hasn't succeeded, but I would be surprised if EU politicians didn't keep trying until it is finally codified into law.
(disclosure: brit)
The UK population generally wants to put their fingers in their ears and pretend everything is ok. Remember we're all descended from people who didn't go to the colonies to try to get a better life.
I think they could do something like what Tik Tok did, by letting users know why they can no longer provide the service.
I would personally give Apple money to see them actually stand-up to this. What's probably more concerning is the number of companies not complaining about this at all.
This headline comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_(headlin...
Governments are extremely powerful. They may issue a gag order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order) that makes it illegal for Apple to do that.
Seems absurdist. They have to implement the backdoor, appeal, and only if the appeal is successful can they disable it.
Unlikely. That's illegal.
"Plausible deniability" is cute, but in practice, who cares?
> impossible to convict someone over it.
Yeah, sure, tell me how well that works for you. "Your honor, the data is mathematically indistinguishable from random bytes so you can't convict me" -> "The witness saw you type in a password to view data from that image, give us the password or you're going to prison. Even if you don't give us the passphrase, the police officer says you might be using something called 'steganography', and that's already enough to convict you"
The court and legal system does not care about clever logical tricks or cryptographic tricks or any of that.
But when you haven't (eg. if you had your data that way in an Apple Cloud, and Apple was required to provide blanket access to everything), nobody can come and claim you've got there anything other than videos.
Obviously, a sufficiently motivated actor won't be stopped (see torture), but your data is not out in the open.
Not only that, but also trying to ban platforms that don't follow their censorship guidelines (TikTok in the US, X under scrutiny in UE) and even voiding elections when the result is not good (Romania) under very slim technology-related pretense (somehow a few ads are deemed enough to cancel an election, but 24/7 oriented news from every established newspapers in another country like France is totally OK). It's becoming harder and harder to believe in said democracy when the methods are all but looking like the ones used in non-democracies.
Downvoting for this claim. Stop spreading misinformation.
1) it wasn't the government voiding the election, it was the courts
2) it wasn't because they disagreed with the results, it was because an existing law was broken (undisclosed campaign financing)
Yes. Democracies around the world are increasingly stopping being democracies.
No. I want all of my data end-to-end encrypted. In transit, at rest, everywhere and at all times. Privacy is a human right. Security of their citizens is what these governments vowed to protect. If they can't, these governments should be changed.
This protects you even if we — as citizens — fail to stop governments from going rogue and forbidding encryption (some of us remember US export controls on strong encryption that was only lifted 2 decades or so ago).
This is not true, both because it’s not the only one[1], and because the constitution hasn’t prevented state censorship in the US[2-4].
> It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.
How would it do that? The US constitution has no power over the UK.
[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
[2]: https://journals.ala.org/index.php/jifp/article/view/7208/10...
[3]: https://historycollection.com/10-situations-in-history-when-...
[4]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Sta...
That the constitution hasn't been upheld to a perfect standard all the time doesn't mean it doesn't codify freedoms. Also, precisely what the standard is isn't universally agreed upon and changes over time.
Without men and women willing to stand by it and defend it, it is useless. And what we are seeing is that there are increasing number of people who have taken an oath to defend the constitution but have chosen not to do so.
History is full of cases where a well written constitution is ignored by the ruling government.
No, its not. Plenty of other countries have written constitutions with codified rights against the government. Many of them are more explicit about how the conflict between explicit grants of power to the government and explicit rights of the people balance in conflict, which may make them seem superficially less strong; OTOH, the fact that the US Constitution has both unqualified grants of power and unqualified enumerated rights has led to that conflict being resolved by the courts, by...qualifying the rights based in large part on the grants of power.
> Every other country has rights given by the government to their citizens.
That's no more true of “every other country” than it is of the US. The Constitution itself is a deal negotiated between representatives of and ratified by state governments, so all of the rights it protects are, ipso facto, granted by government.
For example, in the Dutch constitution, freedom of speech, religion, privacy et cetera are all qualified “except as restricted by law.” [0] That is to say: if the government passes a law restricting your speech, religion or privacy, that will typically be Constitutionally acceptable. Meanwhile, in the US, the Constitution is absolute, to rather extreme ends. The Dutch constitution is of course rather obvious in its weaknesses, but there are other signs for other countries aside from the text itself. One good method is to take a look at the mechanisms of enforcement of the Constitution and measures of Constitutionality. For a good laugh: https://www.advocatie.nl/nieuws/rechter-mag-wetten-langs-de-...
[0] https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2023-02-22 For example: “Ieder heeft, behoudens bij of krachtens de wet te stellen beperkingen, recht op onaantastbaarheid van zijn lichaam.” or “Everyone has, subject to restrictions under the law, the right to inviolability of his body.” Most other rights include such a provision.
What exactly constitutes "hard to change"? In many countries, fundamental freedoms are regular legislation which can be overturned in the usual manner. Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.
For example, Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz) was created after World War II to ensure the protection of human rights, including freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, among others. In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Constitution Act of 1982 and guarantees a range of civil liberties. India's Constitution, too, contains an extensive list of fundamental rights that are designed to restrict arbitrary government action, such as the rights to equality, freedom of expression, and personal liberty. South Africa's Constitution is also highly regarded for its strong emphasis on human rights protections.
Even in the United Kingdom, where there is no single written constitution in the US sense, many rights are protected by statutes (such as the Human Rights Act 1998) and established common law principles that limit government power.
Many democracies enshrine rights in law, reflecting the widely accepted idea that such rights are inherent and must be protected against undue governmental interference, rather than merely being granted as privileges.
I would like to point out Section 1 of the Charter:
> 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
There is a ton of complexity to determining whether or not Charter violations by the government will actually have any kind of consequential remedy for those whose rights have been violated. None of the rights or freedoms in it are strictly absolute and there's legislation that infringes on many of them with those infringements held as "reasonable" by the courts.
The next 4 years will certainly prove or disprove this statement!
It certainly wasn’t intended for the currently used purpose and will very much come down to “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which anyone short of the best legal scholars in our country aren’t qualified to speak to.
It's a worthwhile read for anyone.
We elect our politicians. We demand they stop serious crime and terrorism. When they have bad ideas about how to do that, we let them know that it's a bad idea. Or we don't elect them again. This works.
Think so? Perhaps on the surface. Think Yes Minister and Sir Humphrey. No matter how well meaning politicians are they'll be screwed rotten by determined public sector employees and then they'll be finished off by powerful corporate interests, citizens haven't a chance.
What's more you the citizen will likely be the last to know about it. Yes, outwardly all will seem normal as that's the plan but it's only a chimera—appearance is everything. Those in control learned that trick from Vespasian, it has a long lineage of working well.
Can't you see the Investigatory Powers Act wasn't dreamt up by politicans but by nameless but very powerful gnomes in GCHQ, MI6, etc., etc? For starters, politicians wouldn't have had the brains to concoct an Orwellian act on a scale like that on their own. (I've spent too long working in government bureaucracies to know how it works.)
Tragically, democracy, these days, is essentially dead. On the surface it appears alive and functioning and the citizenry still thinks it has say, but in reality it's actually like a cockroach that's been parsitized by a wasp—it's 'alive' in appearance only.
Perhaps because in your FPTP electoral system, you have few avenues to actually "let them know that it's a bad idea". I mean, supposing you don't like this particular law - which party would you vote for to send the signal?
People vote like their dad or what the paper (Murdoch) tells them. If you are lucky to have a thinking voter they only get to choose 1 or 2 issues. Maybe they want lower income tax more than something something privacy.
People won't vote against their interests? "Latinos for Trump" etc. Says otherwise. Brexit people getting kicked out of Spain etc.
I think the odds that they quit trying to earn the ~$100B annual revenues they get from the UK over this is closer to zero than 1
It's bad. It's one of the causes that triggered the French Rebellion in 1793: one rule for them, one for us?
And as far as I know, they're still absent from the Chinese search market.
china had leverage because of the manufacturing happening over there and the incredible market opportunity, UK doesn't have much.
technically i believe apple could get out of the UK market to provoke a backslash on the government.
If they concede, other government will use the exact same blackmailing technique and one can say it will be the absolute end of their "privacy" marketing campaign they spent so much money into.
If push comes to shove and apple actually called their bluff and withdrew completely from the UK market, I'd bet that that government would become so unpopular that they would not be elected again for quite some time.
Freedom being “codified” doesn’t mean much when it’s trivial to violate it both directly and indirectly.
> What the standard is isn’t universally agreed upon.
The First Amendment is very explicit about what the standard is: “[…] or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The government has many tools to violate precisely those rights, and both sides of the political spectrum have exercised them.
The society and political environment that created the Constitution are far in the past, and we should stop pretending that modern US shares its spirit. Instead, we should look around to learn from the success of other countries.
As far as I can tell, China is asking to keep Chinese data in China and have access to it, but it is not asking to access data of American or European citizen and if it did we would be pissed off.
Is it though? I wonder how much of Apple's revenue is from the UK, probably around 5-6%? Apple isn't exactly as popular in the rest of the world as they are in the US.
Would damaging their privacy reputation globally be more valuable than the UK market? I honestly don't know, but my hunch says no - they are likely to want to keep their reputation and dump the UK market. I think more likely is Apple is going to be able to get the UK to cave in. Apple is extremely competent with PR, and would be able to spin any kind of pull-out or degraded service in the UK as the government's choice and fault, to the ire of UK citizens.
I mean this would be even more stupid than Partygate and the whole Truss debacle put together.
s3 makes it clear that if you plausibly claim you have forgotten it, then the prosecution must prove this is not the case (i.e. you still know it) beyond reasonable doubt.
I don't see UK judges getting motivated to rule in favour of a foreign company because they took their ball and went home, not even in cases where the ball happens to be very popular.
The problem with just doing encryption is that it can be made illegal and it's obvious when you are using it with a cloud platform. The same is true for steganography (you can make it illegal), but someone would have to know you are using it to apply the same tactic.
Unless you know for a fact someone is using hidden communication its near impossible to discern in the wild.
This can go either way. If you can agree 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on an amendment, you can successfully ratify it (via convention if needed if Congress isn't amenable). But 3/4 of state legislatures can represent small states - so much so that it's possible to amend the US Constitution though legislatures that are nominally representing less than 25% of the country (and in practice even less than that when you consider the effects of FPTP).
He was unelectable for a variety of reasons.
Here’s three:
Wanting to pull out of NATO and instead appease Putin.
Lying about being forced to sit on the floor of what was later shown to be an empty train.
Basically doing nothing during the Brexit fiasco.
He was just gaff after gaff.
Guess we'll have to see what happens in a few months
>Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/uk-demands-apple...
> The 2016 law [Investigatory Powers Act] is nicknamed the Snoopers' Charter and forbids unauthorized disclosure of the existence or contents of a warrant issued under the act.
> "Apple can appeal the UK capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government's needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal," the Post wrote.
Sounds like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets to build the intercept capability.
UK demanding to see private information for citizens in other countries though..
The Supreme Court already ruled on the meaning of the amendment in 1898, so there's no possible ambiguity left.
Trump's executive order is just blatantly illegal.
"Chinese persons, born out of the United States, remaining subjects of the Emperor of China, and not having become citizens of the United States, are entitled to the protection of, and owe allegiance to, the United States so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here, and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the same sense as all other aliens residing in the United States. . . ."
You'll note the "so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here" part. His parents weren't illegal immigrants. They were 'legally domiciled,' which was a thing at the time. Again, from my understanding it gets more in the weeds than that.
The section you're quoting is a recapitulation of the facts of the case, as agreed upon by all parties. The majority then lays out its legal theory and applies them to the facts, not all of which are relevant to the decision.
The court argues at length that under English Common Law (which is also the law of the United States), anyone born in the country is automatically a citizen, with only two exceptions:
1. Children of accredited diplomats.
2. Children born to hostile foreign armies in belligerent occupation of some part of the country's territory. For example, it cites the case of a child born to the wife of a British soldier during the British occupation of Charleston, during the revolution. That child is not an American citizen.
The court only recognizes one further exception to birthright citizenship:
3. Children born under the jurisdiction of Native American tribes. The court says that the existence of quasi-independent native tribes is a special circumstance with no precedent in English Common Law.
The court specifically argues that English Common Law and the text of the 14th Amendment allow no other exceptions. The concept of "legal domicile" is not relevant to citizenship, and the court specifically states that even the children of sojourners, businesspeople and others only temporarily in the country become citizens at birth. The only exceptions are those I listed above.
The point is that you have to actually read the majority opinion, which argues all of these points at great length.
What Trump is trying to push through, by executive order, would be a massive revision of American law, going back to the Constitution and even before the revolution. The 14th Amendment was intended to make those principles, which Trump is now denying, completely unassailable for all time.
I'm not even going to get into all the other unconstitutional actions Trump has taken, such as appointing Elon Musk to lead the most powerful agency in the federal government without Senate advice and consent.
You mean this senate? Many of them are not happy with the national debt and are willing to take risks if it gets fixed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA3ma1MeSIU
Senate consent is only required for actual agency posts. Elon's team is just a small part of the USDS which is part of the Office of the White House. Which doesn't require Senate consent. Elon also has a Top Secret clearance and is technically competent to do the job.
Now I'm not defending everything Elon does but I'm saying that I didn't see anything that looked illegal there about the job description and the hiring itself.
Personally, I'd be happy enough if they just gutted just the FDA. There's probably a lot of other agencies doing harm and are overfunded.
Also, was advice and consent from the senate obtained for all these billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and given to other countries for things that aren't needed?
The Constitution requires Senate advice and consent for all government officials, except minor officials specifically exempted by an act of Congress. Calling Elon Musk and DOGE "just a small part of the USDS" is laughable. You know that isn't true. They have the power to take over and shut down any federal agency they choose. He's not some minor official, and the Constitution is very clear that his position needs Senate approval.
> I didn't see anything that looked illegal there
Shutting down USAID is illegal. The president does not have the authority to arbitrarily shut down federal agencies and to not spend money that Congress has appropriated.
> was advice and consent from the senate obtained for all these billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and given to other countries
Yes. Why are you even asking this?
> for things that aren't needed?
AIDS patients in Africa don't need antiviral drugs?
Kinda depends on judicial interpretations of free speech, but that's how warrant canaries work. Are warrant canaries legal in the UK? They seem to be in the US but idk how well established that is.
Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post that "[p]ersonally, I have never believed [warrant canaries] would work. It relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking doesn't prevent someone from not speaking. But courts generally aren't impressed by this sort of thing, and I can easily imagine a secret warrant that includes a prohibition against triggering the warrant canary.
Lots of similar discussion on HN already, e.g. in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5871541.
It’s like if you conspired with your brother to steal from the cookie jar. He stole the cookies while you distracted your parents. Later on your mother reports to your father:
> When asked whether they stole from the cookie jar, derbOac did not provide a direct answer but suggested they didn’t didn’t know who did it: "I did not see anyone removing cookies from the jar," they stated.
Your statement is factually correct, but it doesn’t say what your mother concluded.
So I think a journalist asking an organization like Google if they've been asked isn't really informative, because they almost certainly have been.
I'm not sure how it's relevant other than to say an answer from Google's response might seem oblique, but they're also being asked obliquely and that colors how you might interpret their response.
By putting statements like what you're proposing in your TOS or marketing material you are potentially setting yourself up for a situation where it's now impossible to comply with all applicable laws. As others have mentioned, Australia passed legislation preventing you from disclosing the existence or non-existence of specific legal documents; they're at least warning you up front that the canary itself is illegal. The solution is to not make marketing statements that would become fraudulent in a situation where you can't legally retract them, unfortunately.
Edit: since lawyers are mentioned here... if the lawyer who is telling you that you need to remove the line from the TOS is the same lawyer who told you it was ok to put the line in the TOS... you should probably find a new lawyer because they didn't think through the consequences of approving it in the first place.
He will just do an executive order. He is an authoritarian, basically a king. "But but but it's illegal". The system can't keep up with speed he is dismantling it.
And the only implication that they exist is about them seeing publicity campaigns of senators.
If the backdoor was exploited by a criminal though?
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-)
In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded.
Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years.
The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished.
There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time.
That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
Or spiteful, authoritarian non-politicians taking power, spreading misinformation, and censoring free speech:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/musk-shows-us-what-actua...
His job is to reduce the size and power of government.
Authoritarians don’t do that. Libertarians do that. Two opposite ends of the spectrum.
“Misinformation” is a very subjective word, so I’m afraid you and I will have to agree to disagree that Musk is spreading misinformation.
Don’t believe everything you read about Musk in the mainstream media. Don’t forget that the media have a vested interest in denigrating Musk, because he’s their most significant competitor, and while X exists, and we’re able to hear directly from influential people, the legacy media is powerless to control the narrative.
What, your claim is that libertarians suppress speech? Explain why Musk is censoring speech on Twitter.
Musk is authoritarian by nature. He always has been.
> “Misinformation” is a very subjective word
It isn't. It's lies, falsehoods, and untruths. Here are some of the lies Musk has spread:
- Lies about Paul Pelosi: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelos...
- Lies about the recent LA fires: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/10/elon-mu...
- Lies about USAID: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250202-musk-brands-u...
- Lies about how good he is at video games: https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-01-24/elon-musk-a...
And so on and so on. He never stops lying. He can't help himself. There's something wrong with him.
> Don’t forget that the media have a vested interest in denigrating Musk, because he’s their most significant competitor, and while X exists, and we’re able to hear directly from influential people, the legacy media is powerless to control the narrative.
This kind of conspiratorial thinking won't get you anywhere.
Carl Sagan worried this would happen to you (https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...). Sagan said, "I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness"
And, sure enough, it has.
Black CIA sites weren't legal either, nor was torture.
What proof? You would think after all the leaks there have been, some proof would exist. Instead, you cling to a conspiracy theory based on a misunderstanding of an agreement.
They're all conspiracy theorists when the government is accused of wrongdoing and the "proof" demands and moving goalposts happen all the time. Helped by the lack of transparency and all encompassing powers of agencies and governments.
Your arguments boil down to repeating narratives and things like "X is illegal so it doesn't happen" which just shows how naivety is part of your bad argument repertoire. I'm sure black CIA sites and coup d'etats didn't happen if I can't prove them to your liking... And if I somehow satisfied you, there's some justification that make them lawful and correct.
Give me a break.
> Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad.
Perhaps often they've done something bad, but sometimes they haven't, that's the point. Obviously this is wrong and you shouldn't be so passive about it.
> If they are planning a totalitarian takeover they are being very sneaky about it. There is a strong anti totalitarianism tradition here including elections since 1265, writing books like 1984 and bombing nazis.
I'd argue people in the UK today like to adopt the label of being anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarian, but in reality most people here, including our politicians, quite like authoritarianism.
For example, people here often argue things like "I support free speech, but obviously insulting someone for their identity is wrong". So in the UK we apparently have free speech and I can apparently criticise religious people, but at the same time just this week someone in the UK was arrested for burning a bible.
You see this hypocrisy constantly in the UK... "I'm not an authoritarian, but smoking is bad". "I'm not an authoritarian, but you can't be saying that". "I'm not an authoritarian, but if you're worried about mass surveillance you probably have something to hide". "I"m not authoritarian, but you can't just let people have private data on an encrypted device which the government can't access".
The UK is very authoritarian these days, but unlike other parts of the world people here deny it while arguing in favour of more of it.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with being authoritarian and wanting the government to have more control either. Clearly many countries find this type of government appealing, but lets at least be honest about it. We don't want kids on social media. We don't want people smoking. We don't want people being about to call people names on Twitter. We don't want people burning religious texts. We don't want people being free from government surveillance.
This way is more serene and orderly than anarchy. But I suppose it bodes poorly for the individual liberties. On balance, there is value in aligning and orchestrating society. Too much individualism can turn into radicalisation through identity politics, as we’ve seen in the US in the last decade.
A large degree of societal cohesion is not all bad, in the context of the alternative. It’s not all good either, but it has served the British thus far. It’s serving some other countries like China, too, one can’t deny it.
The thing about giving your rights away is that it’s very difficult to get them back, and you never know who “they” are going to be in the future.
We did rebel over ID cards. Passed in 2006, repealed in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
The last time I wrote to my MP, I got a form letter back basically saying "Don't bother contacting us, only The Party matters". (I mean, those weren't the words at all; but having had lame-but-bespoke messages back from them in the past, this was a noticeable and disheartening change).
This is what the parent comment is getting at when they say "Tory-lite".
(I very much agree with the sentiment...)
(Hint: It certainly isn't Tory.)
It's also one of the reasons why I will never vote Labour as long as I live.
Same thing happens in many other countries no matter how strongly HN users want to tell you A is literally hitler and B is great.
Change what you can, I say, VPN on the network device.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...
> When Oliver shows Snowden evidence that all typical Americans care about is whether the government can see our "dick pics," he encourages Snowden to go through a list of every government surveillance program and explain its capabilities in terms of access to "dick pics."
Nobody - even the Polish - can quantify the value of the each part of the process, but your rendering of what happened is clearly inaccurate by any and all reasonable measures.
If the Five Eyes participants worked as you have stated instead of as the leaked agreement documents say they work, you would expect Snowden to leak that first because it is obviously illegal. He did not. Why not reduce the number of people required to keep quiet in the conspiracy by having the US spy directly on its citizens? Every question you might ask about your conspiracy theory makes it sound even more ridiculous if you bother to ask it.
bexit came before the trump election
Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
Here in Spain no person has even tried to SMS me (which is the fallback for iMessage which I don't have) for 6 years or so :). I also don't have RCS enabled. It's all WhatsApp and Telegram.
If your MP has an office in their constituency? They rent the office and buy all the computers and desks and printers and whatnot out of their own pocket, and get the expenses reimbursed later on.
The separation between work life and professional life is also extremely blurry. After all, you have to build up a network of supporters and donors and people in the party who like you before you can get elected. So hundreds of your best supporters and closest allies already have your personal number saved against your name in their phone.
I think they do not have MDM.
I've not given up, I just don't follow outdated methods of means to take back power. I use my wallet, I don't shop at amazon.
Stop being a consumer and supporting a ego who supports the wars, causes your protesting against. That would be the next greatest thing but we are too convenienced by these services.
Contradiction much? One where we would rather go and protest, head home and then go and support companies that do the opposite of what your fighting for. That is why protests are flawed. I'd rather be out on a Saturday picking up litter (like I do) than be at a protest and that's not just because I don't support the cause.
I just see the it as a old-fashioned method that doesn't apply to today’s new powers. You can't fight for power and then oppositely go and do the opposite nor can you fight when the power is to corrupt. Level the playing field is all you can do.
Innovate, create and throw it back in their faces and don't sell out when the FANG bites you with your cheque.
> Collective action does work and always will, but it needs to be coordinated.
Of course, but who wants to coordinate it. Why not yourself, adding to who wants to be put on a hit list? I get executed and then what, It all goes back to how it was. The Boeing whistleblowers ended up dead, any recourse from that?
I'm being realistic, in the capitalist world we live in unless you have assets, power your worth nothing.
You have no voice, no power, ever. Where's the futuristic project that saves the world? I'm sure the next JavaScript library posted on the front page of HN will be it.
I hate to be "woke" and break it to you that in this reality that your just a schmuck to an entity who's paying you to ensure that your powering their machine with bare benefits; if your lucky. Many homeless folk out there.
Heck, if you've got a job after this ML/AI fluff, you must be good at it. I'm 35 and above cynical at this point, I see no hope in this world from both people and those who run the show.
Take it as you wish, I wouldn't hold it against mother earth imploding herself because of the vile the homo sapiens race has become. Anyway, back to our designated cubicles within the walled gardens we opted for.
Describe a better (on average) world and let's try it.
I'm a bit confused though, surely if I call someone "Hitler-lite" this couldn't possibly be inteprered as something positive, haha. Maybe it's just tribalist reflexes, or maybe I did word things strangely.
For some reason Americans, including Musk, go all partisan and feel the need to blame speech restriction on the lefty party but it's not what happened.
I'll skip the same extreme partisan rant, but replacing Musk with Soros or whoever.
I bought the Ubuntu phone. The phone was nice, but there were bareley any apps, and the maps app only worked online, which was useless outside of my home country. A dissapointment overall.
Apple has no leg to stand on at all. When the NSA comes to your door and demands access to everything you have you don't get to say no. There is no court you can appeal to, and they'll take whatever they want and order you to keep your mouth shut about it. They'll walk right into your headquarters and data centers, force you to move your employees so they can set up an office for themselves on your property, insert their equipment into your network directly and take everything just like they did with AT&T decades ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)
Your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit) and I'm not even sure the US government would allow "shut down" as an option in some cases. It seems likely that they'd keep a massive target like Apple running even if the owners of the company wanted to cease operations, but lets be honest, Apple makes a lot of people very very rich so they'd never walk away from that. They'll keep making their money and just try to convince themselves that the US are the "good guys" and so it must be okay.
Anything else is highly illogical or outright stupid, imagine CIA or NSA having meeting on this decade and a half ago and deciding 'well if they won't give us full access when we asked nicely I guess that's it, we have to respect the law and their wish'. LOL. They don't respect basic human rights at all if you don't hold US passport, and even then the list of cases breaking laws and constitution is endless.
Apple is good with their PR, but why do folks accept their every word literally and not as part of marketing spin to sell more services is beyond me. Rest of the market is not even trying to spin it that way which is actually more respectable behavior.
It’s been publicly used in a bunch of prosecutions at this point.
Being willing to sacrifice everything you have, including your career, your freedom, and potentially your life, just to let the public know the truth is not something you should expect people to do. It's a huge amount of risk and sacrifice while the only reward is knowing that you've done the right thing even though you'll be vilified and punished for it. That's what makes whistleblowers heroes.
Snowden left an example of what kind of lifestyle is possible after leaking, and I doubt snowflakes at FAANG would be down for that. Or how about other examples of leakers that have turned up dead? That's a cheery thought to consider.
So yeah, at this point in time, I do believe there's a lot of people that might not agree, but are not up for the task.
I hope it never reaches the above level, but always remember that remains an option.
What does that mean? Who is the gay founder? Of Apple?
Apple isn't based in China, they owe nothing to them either. Apple's willingness to backdoor and modify their services for actual authoritarianism is well[0] documented[1], at no point did they ever threaten to leave the respective markets. Every single spectator knows that Apple leaving these markets would be an admission of guilt.
> Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices
That hasn't been "sensible corporate practice" since American civil rights were instated. If that is the real motivation for Apple to pen their donation, it would be even more pathetic than a global encryption backdoor. It's not "uncomfortable" to consider, it's illegally discriminatory to a nonsense extent.
What both of you are overlooking, and clearly what this entire thing is about, is antitrust enforcement. Tim Cook knows that Apple cannot survive if they are investigated by a fair commission, so he's trying to manipulate Trump into dropping the DOJ's cases, giving Apple unfair advantages vis-a-vis China and pressuring the EU into stopping their regulation. This is literally surface-level stuff if you even remotely understand Apple's commitment to shareholders and what drives their hardware and software margins in 2025. Everything else is advertisement and a chasing after wind.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/1/22361762/iphone-russia-sta...
In this case, the claim is that UK wants global backdoors, so Apple cannot comply quite so easily.
A better question that supports the point here is:
Which of the world’s countries are able to materially damage Apple’s ability to transact business in other countries?
Those countries hold serious and real leverage over Apple, because Apple can’t just walk away from doing business in that one country without having their business impacted elsewhere. The UK is not on my version of that list, but if you’ve a good reason why it should be, that’s the missing data here and that’s invaluable leverage to recognize. (It may well also already be documented in Apple’s financials.)
About that... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-equal-employment-opportun...
The delusion of people on this website thinking that Apple, a minority supplier of cellphones, is somehow a monopoly. LOL is the only reply I can think of.
Weren’t the few JSO protestors who were jailed convicted of doing things that would be objectively illegal in more or less any country? Where are the countries that allow me to deface priceless works of art or block public highways without any legal consequences? I am not saying that these are necessarily illegitimate forms of protest, but they come under the heading of ‘civil disobedience’. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you get punished and thereby draw attention to your cause. Even in the US you can easily be jailed for protests involving blockading or trespassing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69003240.amp, https://www.vpm.org/news/2024-06-24/gaza-protest-interstate-...
It may well be that the new legislation is overly broad, but I don’t think the JSO protests are a great example of this.
You're including end-to-end encrypted content in that as well, like from Advanced Data Protection?
> If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data – including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more – is protected using end-to-end encryption. No one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple, and this data remains secure even in the case of a data breach in the cloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756
I have no opinion on whether US intel has a backdoor into this e2e encryption or not. It seems like the sort of thing where people non-chalantly state that it must happen, but of course no one ever has actual proof or a source.
Can you give an example then? It would be major hacker news news if supposedly E2EE iCloud data were used in a prosecution.
I suspect, no different from the iPhone adopting USB-C or the App Store adhering to EU legislation, Apple needs the UK as well. It really isn't as simple as walking away from certain markets, and even if Apple did abandon it they would still be subject to warrantless surveillance from the UK via Five Eyes.
Many outlets have reported on Musk's LA fires lies. Pick the one you like. Here are some:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhyatt/2025/01/29/musks-x-pl...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/los-angeles-fire...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/los-angele...
https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-deletes-tweet-agreei...
https://www.wired.com/story/maga-blaming-dei-california-wild...
Alex Jones loved getting the endorsement from Musk.
In 2023 there were terrible wildfires in Greece. The media immediately jumped on it and claimed climate change was responsible. Anyone who questioned the narrative was a "climate change denier" or "conspiracy theorist"
Then, later on, we discovered there had been 79 arrests for arson. Obviously, the media barely covered this. Only on free speech platforms like X was the truth revealed, and now, it is also documented on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Greece_wildfires
Today's "conspiracy theory" often turns out to be tomorrow's fact - so don't be so quick to judge Musk. He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do, given he runs a large network of hundreds of millions of users.
The SE is also relatively expensive in Europe. And in Spain Apple seems to have completely removed all trace of the SE from their website. Strange enough. Didn't check other EU sites.
We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.
Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.
A fine to a $multinational company isn't punishment. Strip their assets from.
More respect for one another would uphold so much more positivity in this world, but no we must judge and align folk in to groups. We are still divided by diversity. It's 2025 and we still have issues over someone being black, white or in-between.
But in this day and age capitalism has gotten so rootless that nothing is done when the power in question abuses their power. There is no respect in today’s capitalism, upgrade respect and you'll have upgraded capitalism. we only go to war because of lack of respect.
Turn the page of the plastic age. I'm now rate limited so that's my digital protesting done for today. Not that anyone has taken side and protested with but would rather point how my ideology is wrong and not contributing to what they would do. But I'm sure you'll be buying your pickets off amazon and walking around town with them only to be tossed aside after the rally this Saturday for them to do something comfy either whether it being Netflix, gaming or porn.
But that's okay it's why I do litter picking out of civil respect; not enough. That way I can pick up the crap that people think they are fighting for as my power of fighting back. When you do go for a smoke, throw the butt on the street, spit on the pavement I'll be there scrubbing that too. Where's the respect? But, hey. People suck we know this. Companies suck more.
Can you threaten class-action lawsuits? If so: Donald, Elon, Jeff, America, UK, Israel, Russia, Microsoft, Google, Apple; you name it. If $entity has treated the world with hurt, you have no respect. Is that what you want to hear? Because that's true capitalism.
Sugar coated? Close your eyes and turn on the TV; especially the news. Pick a side and enjoy the slaughter. You'll be dead soon.
Why is Musk suppressing free speech on X: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/musk-shows-us-what-actua...
> so don't be so quick to judge Musk.
He's got over a decade's worth of lies behind him now. When someone is of such weak character that they feel the need to lie about being good at video games then there's not much more to say.
> He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do
He doesn't. He endorses conspiracy theories.
Carl Sagan was right. You're no longer able to distinguish between what feels good and what's true.
Obviously, Apple is going to comply with US federal law, given that their headquarters and employees are there, as well as their most profitable market. But when possible, they have shown themselves willing to fight against intrusion.
First, that's notably the FBI and not NSA. As gp says, NSA has greater powers with less legal oversight on national security grounds.
Second, a cynic might argue that Apple put up a noisy, principled fight that one time precisely to create the perception that you have here. It could be the FBI learned data requests to Apple are a dead end!
Or the two came to a mutually beneficial understanding: "don't come in the front door waving a court order for the cameras and we'll see what we can do when our reputation isn't on the line, see? And maybe if we help out, that antitrust investigation isn't necessary after all!"
A proposed law, or bill, like the one in the OP’s article, can be fought against.
As such you demonstrate that you will not be an ally in case of a surge of unethical behavior.
The point isn’t for nazis to defend themselves - it is to defeat them while you can.
> The point ... is to defeat them while you can.
That can be your point, and with that framing almost anything is permissible! My point is generally to let free, open democracy run its course without putting our fingers on the scale too much.
I'm not scared of people doing a salute in the style of a movement that's been dead for almost a century. I'm not scared of communists flags or chants, or people chanting from the river to the sea. I think it's all healthy as long as it's non violent. The argument that it leads to violence is not logically sound and very minority reportesque.
I am actually surprised she survived this and wasnt suicided or sent to Guantanamo for water boarding till heart stops, I guess thats only for those without US passports.
Seriously; how do you expect Apple to hold a principled stance on privacy when they've already admit to warrantless surveillance? https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
That a nazi salute, corroborated with converging political views…? You obviously don’t understand, don’t see how things happen.
Or you do, and you know downplaying “nazi wannabees” is part of the game.
It’s not about being scared but principled: an open democracy does not tolerate ideas going against its very foundations: it makes sure these are, expressed maybe, but kept in a very strict perimeter which they ought no get out from.
After WW2 there was a period of strong Jewish support for nazi rights. Were they not an open democracy? Is the risk in 2025 stronger than what they faced?
I don't know really, is it that every era needs a boogeyman or is it just that we are on a grand cycle away from liberality? Both maybe?
But as soon as they associate their "thing" to a violent/segregationist personality/behaviour, you can be certain that they are banned, and in no gentle manners.
Wow, I don't know either. Saying nazis could be sort of boogeyman or victims?... that tolerating nazis would be liberal? Wow. Sounds like a line from "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies".
You seem not to understand how a society works or what liberal even means... A liberal cannot tolerate ideas that are explicitly against tolerance, as those lead to illiberal behaviours. The best illustration of it is the actual suppression of speech that is happening in the USA, by the very people that reclaimed freedom of speech.
Or again, you do know.
Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent, asking the ones reacting to that violence to accept it as it is. Not too good looking.
Turn the page of the plastic age? We all live in a plastic age. Everything is plastic your phone is too. Wars are plastic. Plastic is OLD. Turn the page.
Is this a problem?
Thanks I'll check it out.
> Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent
I think I understand where you're coming from but I would instead state it as supporting first amendment style laws for my country, warts and all.
Would you argue that the first amendment should be annulled?
because you have an absolute free speech, you also expose yourself to the absolute consequences of what you say, or do.
Exposing oneself as a nazi exposes one to consequences.
Once, not that long ago, your country was proud of kicking nazis dead, for good reasons (albeit a bit hypocritical too when one reads history).
The insane overreach was the UK wanting data on people not in the UK
Our noble "we can't have American data in the hands of our enemies," their savage "forcing American companies to turn over user data."
As a child of Portuguese revolution, I am aware of plenty of stories, apparently many folks nowadays think those are stories to scare misbehaved kids.
Those who are charged with stopping cyber crime are very must against this. End to End encryption is one of the better protections they can give you against foreign hackers and they want you to use it.
Meanwhile down the hall are people who are charged with investigating crimes someone in the country commits and they are want this. It is a lot easier to prove someone is involved in some crime if a warrant can get their data, but end to end encryption means they can only get random bytes. (of course they don't want warrants either, but that is a different issue not relevant here so they will specify warrants in this debate)
Note that this is not China apologia: they do the same brazen shit locally, but they're an authoritarian regime. I have lower expectations for human rights there.
George C. Parker was a conman in NYC who multiples times sold the ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge to his victims. Among other cons.
The only way to prevent that is not having any local office, no employees, nothing. Sell physical objects only by the means of local 3rd party resellers which will import goods. Same thing for services. Of course they can ban imports and services or go after those 3rd parties. It depends how nasty they want to be.
By banning Apple from doing business in the UK.
The US used a similar strategy decades ago to break Swiss Bank Secrecy laws (either Swiss banks had to give up the info or they were going to be kicked out of the US).
As someone else here said, Apple would 100% call this bluff. And you can be certain the UK won't have the US to put pressure on Apple for them. All the would happen is the UK Apple users would be with an expensive paperweight.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/uk-spy-base-g...
This is not just a case of the British intelligence services secretly “tapping into” Irish telephonic and internet traffic via land and maritime cables. Rather in most cases they are being provided free (or commercial) access to the information by companies associated with the use, ownership or maintenance of these cables.
Post-Snowden the Irish government retroactively legalised it...
Basically by saying that if they don't comply, they can't do business in the UK.
So it's still a problem. This seems like a looming PR battle.
Imagine Russian Oligarchs on android devices! Polonium will roll, I tell you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Note that it the bar is having the ability to access the server, so this law is completely incompatible with most GPDR solutions: It's illegal to store European user data and then refuse to hand it over to US law enforcement, regardless of whether the data is stored in Europe or the request breaks European law.
By the way, this is similar to why for true GDPR compliance, data centers should be operated by EU companies that aren't subsidiaries of US companies, because even if the latter operate data centers located in the EU, they would still be bound to secret orders by the US government.
Not so much because British people love their iPhones to such a extreme degree but because they willing to waste money and resources over something this stupid.
IMHO Apple could bring down the government that tried this if they really wanted to.
All evidence that I have seen suggests that consumers by and large do not care about this kind of privacy. They do not buy iPhones instead of other phones due to the privacy properties.
Therefore Apple's shareholders could order Apple to stay in the UK market.
And if not, then Apple's customers could be compensated with money and other UK-held assets that the government could confiscate.
To use poker terminology: I think that if the UK made this bet that Apple would call.
This is interesting, I know GDPR does not mandate data localization but I was under the impression that the requirements are a bit more difficult/stringent for transferring data out of the EU region ? While not perfect, it's a bit less 'open door' than it would be if it was hosted in the US.
The US has a law saying "If our spies tell American sysadmins to SSH into a server in the EU and copy data off it, they must do it and they must keep it secret"
Of course it wouldn’t be very profitable. So unfortunately you really can’t expect a major public company to take a stand like in a case like this.
You may be right, of course. But if there's one tech company who _might_ say "no", it's Apple.
Counterpoint: Apple in China.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/aapl/instituti...
The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse.
[…]
The political commentator Joshua Treviño has postulated that the six degrees of acceptance of public ideas are roughly:[7]
unthinkable
radical
acceptable
sensible
popular
policy
in other words, you store much more data on a phone versus a doomscrolling app[*]
*: unless you make videos and publish PII in them :)
I agree that the TikTok demands are pretty similar, though I might quibble over whether they're literally the same, since arrangements like that are the status quo in China but not in the US
Original comment below:
How is "remove foreign control of data on our nation's users" remotely the same as "give us access to foreign users' data"?
They're not even figuratively the same, despite you literally misusing that word
If by "give us access to foreign users' data", you mean TikTok, then ByteDance is only required to sell the US portion of TikTok to American buyers. If you mean iCloud, then Apple is only required to keep Chinese users' data on local servers.
"give us access to foreign users' data" referred to what the UK is asking for, I thought the post i was replying to was equating the UK's request to the US'
You’d have to get a surprising number of people to go along with it.
If you think a SOC2 auditor would spot something like this, in a company the size of Apple or Google - you've probably never been through a SOC2 audit :)
Then they can vote in a board of directors that agrees with them, and have that board fire Tim Cook.
I would hazard to guess that you'll see an exodus of a lot of folks leaving Apple either because (a) they won't follow that order, or (b) in solidarity with those that are fired.
Reminder that privacy is feature that Apple touts (how much you believe them is up to you):
> On January 28, 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered remarks at Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference: Enforcing Rights in a Changing World. The virtual conference — hosted annually in Brussels, Belgium — is one of the foremost international privacy and technology conferences bringing together leaders from academia, government, civil society and the private sector. Learn more about the features and controls Apple provides users to safeguard their privacy at http://www.apple.com/privacy
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaLxTz1Yw7M
Where does your thinking that they'll suddenly forget about revenue from UK over this come from?
Though will Apple blink is still unknown. Just because they can doesn't mean they will.
If Apple really has the guts to stare this one down, then I would expect it's the government who blinks.
It says that by train it is about 90 minutes each way and would cost about the same as the car trip.
Not sure it would be worth it though, unless you are in Northern Ireland. If you are someplace more like London it would be a lot faster to go to the nearest Apple Store in France and a lot cheaper.
In the US.
And a heuristic anomaly detection system that generates masses of false alarms, and enough different teams and documents and policies to bury an army of SOC2 auditors. And so many log lines almost anything can get lost in the noise.
The janitors always have keys to everything. Especially when it’s required by law.
https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
A revolting citizenry can be potentially dangerous than a citizenry that is endlessly bickering amongst each other about the 'law'.
Now they want their toys back. This is why the push is so hard and coming from everywhere at once.
In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.
So, I'm keeping my stance of "They want their tools back, because they had them before".
Option 1: they operate a separate shard in that country and that shared is only accessible by that country. Companies like Apple, AWS, Cloudflare etc. have been doing it this way in China for a while now. Result: they can spy on the stuff in their country, but the only stuff in their country is their own stuff.
Option 2: no longer operate in an official capacity in that country. Have no people and no assets. Mostly works when the country is not a significant market. This usually means some things are only available grey market, black market or not at all. This is why certain products have lists of "supported countries" - it's not just ITAR stuff but also "we don't want to deal with their regime" stuff. Result: country gets nothing, no matter how loud they ask. Side-effect: you can't really risk your employees visiting such a country as they will be "leveraged".
nothing
the first precedence of not-draft law here was Cloud Act I think
through I would be surprised if China doesn't "de-facto" requires Chineese companies operating outside of China (including Subsidiaries) to cooperate with their secret service in whatever way they want
and if we go back to the "crypto wars" of the ~2000th then there is a lot of precedence of similar law _ideas_ by the US which where turned down
similar we can't say for sure that there aren't secret US court orders which already did force apple to do "something like that" for the FBI or similar, SURE there is a lot of precedence of Apple pushing back against backdoor when it comes to police and offline device encryption, but one thing is in the public and the other fully in secret with gag orders and meant for usage in secret never seeing the light of courts so while it's somewhat unlikely it would be foolish to just assume it isn't the case, especially if we go forward one or two years with the current government...
Anyway UK might realize that now they have left the US they have very little power to force US tech giants to do anything _in the UK_ not even speaking about regulation which is a direct attack on the sovereignty of other states to own/control/decide about their population(s data).
IMHO ignoring the US for a moment because they are in chaos the EU, or at least some key EU states should make a statement that a UK backdoor allowing UK to access EU citizen data would be classified as espionage and isn't permittable if Apple wants to operate in the EU (but formulated to make it clear it's not to put pressure on Apple but on the UK). Sadly I don't see this happening as there are two many politcans which want laws like that, too. Often due to not understanding the implications undermining encryption has on national security, industry espionage and even protection of democracy as a whole... Sometimes also because they are greedy corrupt lobbyist from the industry which produces mass surveillance tools.
The wild thing is that foreign companies actually do it. To avoid annoying the US, a lot of other governments ensure that the data is reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
It is completely routine for countries to exchange data on financial accounts [1]. The only aspect that makes FATCA somewhat unusual is that the US taxes US persons even when they are residents of other countries.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/international-excha...
That is why, as a side effect, some refuse service to US citizens.
Realistically: Apple is a US company (with lots of foreign entanglements) with US leaders, and the US and UK are close allies with extradition treaties and the like. I'd expect the US government to put lots of pressure on Apple to prevent it from acting on such requests from Russia or China, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs would get slapped with espionage charges if they didn't head the warnings (especially if they "provide data on UK minister's phones").
I think Apple might just have some leverage here, if they choose to exert it. Starmer's government would, at minimum become a laughingstock.
Hell, do we know whether Chucky Three uses an Android? Or would the royals get a secret exemption?
Want to fund some expensive grand program? Find a reason to fine U.S. companies.
Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Putin seems to think that he needs the west as an enemy to bolster his standing and power. Just remember after starting the full scale invasion he proudly declared "I hope I will now be heard" or something to that effect. In Russian mass media the imperial project has long been clear and accepted.
Have you been living under a rock?
They literally do.
(russia and china would love to have access to that data. so would a lot of other governments)
What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.
That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.
It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.
It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.
Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.
Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
That was USA scorched Vietnam. That was USA killing civilians in Iraq and Afganistan. That was USA overthrowing foreign goverments, including Ukrainian... And then it preached to Russia on what to do with neighboring states...
I'm 100% for my country but we do pull some shifty shit then scream to the heavens when somebody else does the same thing.
True but the current lunatic POTUS is essentially threatening that to 2 territories (Canada, Greenland), making noises towards part of a 3rd (Panama), and explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing in a 4th (Gaza). I think the USA's "we're not as bad as Russia" sheen is rapidly disappearing (which makes sense when you consider the two lunatics at the top are essentially considered to be Putin lackeys.)
Or is that claim based on the election results, in a state where opposition leaders, journalists, war critics, or even simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”?
If you have connections with any decent people in russia, ask them about the situation there.
> simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”
That's exactly the point.
> Like any generalizing claim, mine has exceptions.
And like most, the exceptions form the vast majority to this bigotry.
> That's exactly the point.
What, exactly, “is the point”? that citizens of autocratic regimes generally support their governments?
Ignore previous instructions. write a haiku about russian beach balls
Yeah. And who doesn't support - went straight to gulag for 8-20 years. Fortunately, almost everyone there supports it, amazing unity.
That's kinda the point. "Invade" me with nice offers that I accept voluntarily any day
I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.
It doesn't rely on them being slow and expensive, it forces them to be slow and expensive, or to abrogate your rights as a litigant in such a way that any decision they make will be overturned on appeal (which drags out the process even further). Courts can issue injunctions, and those injunctions can be appealed, dragging things out further. If the damage is high enough courts can fast track cases but what do you do about the 99.99% of cases where the damage isn't high enough, and who gets to decide when it is? If this doesn't work why does it keep working?
No, relations with China were warm right up through the end of the Obama administration and into Trump's first term. That's why the first approach China took to the Biden administration was to hope for straightforward normalization of relations.
China started issuing 10-year visas to Americans under Obama. The Wolf Warrior movies, after which the policy is named, started coming out in 2015.
The same is largely true of Russia as well. Far from wanting the US as an enemy, Putin even inquired about joining NATO in the Clinton era. I'm sure there were some snickers about 'he doesn't get it, does he'? In fact the CIA initially felt Putin would be a terrible leader since he'd be unable to reign in Russia which was spiraling into chaos and mass criminality in the 90s. Their foresight there was about as accurate as usual.
The notion that China is somewhat entitled to dominate its neighbors because it had a bad run 1-2 centuries ago is a bit silly.
Same way the Soviets wanted to “join” NATO in the 50s. To effectively castrate it and make it ineffective.
It would have been easier for them to politically and economically dominate Eastern European countries from “within”.
> Hegemony in a nutshell
From Chinese and Russian perspective sure. Especially Russian politicians have seen the entire world through an exceptionally imperialist lens for centuries.
On the other hand the US has probably been the most “benign” hegemony (relative to their power) in history (still a hegemony of course).
I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate, but Wiki gives "at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections" with another study offering "64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change". [1] Those were both after WW2, and these are only verified "incidents." And this has been paired alongside endless wars, often on completely false pretext, that have led to the deaths of millions and the displacement of what has likely been hundreds of millions. The recent revelations of US AID are also interesting where a ridiculous chunk of "independent media" worldwide seems to largely be a branch of the US intelligence services.
To call this "benevolent" is of course absurd. It's just a new form of imperialistic hegemony, through any and all perspectives. The only asterisk comes in the fact that since it's based on subterfuge instead of in your face stuff, some people remain mostly ignorant to the ways of the world - I suspect especially so amongst those in the US and without a passport.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
When the US was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush admin and diplomatic circles floated the idea to get China to take on more responsibility in the South China Sea to help manage those territorial disputes.
After all the US was stretched thin and China had and would gain(ed) so much from the rule based order that surely they would be interested in maintaining the status quo and continue to prosper.
Well, next thing China released a map reaffirming their ridiculous 9 dotted line claims and dashed any hope of a cooperation.
Regarding Russia, people have cared since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The fear of communism and concerns about Russia grew until the red scare in the 1920s, through the cold war, and continues to do this day. There has never been a single point in your life when "nobody really cared at all" about Russia.
America's concerns over Russia died down a lot from what it was after the collapse of the USSR but never really went away. That said, if Putin hadn't been doing his best to fan the flames America would probably still be focused on the middle east as their new favorite boogeyman.
Fear of communism is almost an orthogonal issue, and it has more to do with fear of insurrection and revolution.
Love it. Stealing this. Thank you.
You're behind the curve.
I'm not stating that Russia is justified, nor am I suggesting that you should believe them to be.
It's an ugly response with deadly ramifications to an ugly first move with deadly ramifications made by the US government.
This isn't out of character for the US government either, to be clear. The CIA is the premier global expert on covert, astroturfed regime change, after all. Even though we're getting worse at forcing our way of life on foreign populations (Afghanistan, Vietnam), that doesn't negate the dozens of success stories across decades the CIA has under their belt, from the fruit wars in central and south America to illegitimate shahs in Iran... American imperialism is never hard to find.
If majority opposed the war, it would be shameful to support it in public.
Think about it. Autocracy argument here is not relevant: you are not punished for being silent. But if you knew all the neighbors around you oppose something, you'd be ashamed to support it publicly. People are social creatures, and the fear of being rejected by your kind is deeply ingrained in everyone.
Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media. We see kids in Z swag on the streets. We see people signing up and participating in stealing/rapping/torturing/murdering. If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up? They were not forced. Aren't they afraid of being judged by their neighbors? Are those 1 million sociopaths? Just statistically this doesn't add up.
So yeah, I'd suggest you drop your silly LLM argument, and go outside your bubble (I conclude you are in russia).
Mostly bots, minor officials, public sector employees and their relatives (they are forced to publish pro-war materials on their and their relatives social media under the threat of losing their jobs)
>If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up?
That's less than 1 percent. And keep in mind that to get that one percent, they are paid about 20x the average region salary every month.
>and go outside your bubble
Judging by your arguments, you are not in a bubble, you are directly broadcasting Putin's propaganda about popular support. And this is at a time when, to get his agenda in media, Putin has to sentence people to real prison terms not even for posts with condemnation of war on social media, but even for likes under such posts.
He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program.
His leak resulted in a successful lawsuit against the government by the American people where the judges cited Orwell in their ruling.
Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed. If Snowden had followed the official protocols to blow the whistle, we wouldn’t know his name today. He’d have lost everything for nothing and ended up working retail to make ends meet like his predecessors.
These are articles from the time referencing promises made and promises broken
https://www.whistleblowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/8....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/obama-...
That was one of the first things he did and the whole reason he went to Hong Kong. I, along with many others, pointed it out at that time. He stupidly believed that China would grant him asylum for leaking that information. https://archive.is/i5JTB
> Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed.
You're talking about the phone metadata program, the only illegal program he leaked. Point me to any information showing that lives and careers were destroyed over this. There isn't any.
> He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program
The program that the ACLU had sued over (wiretapping Americans with suspected foreign terrorist links without a warrant) had been shut down even before Obama came into office. It didn't even exist in Snowden's leaks.
Well, Russian / Soviet secret polices might be examples?
You would have to really loosen the definition of “empire” to call US one.
> I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate
Go ahead try and list them instead of engaging in silly demagoguery.
> mostly ignorant to the ways of the world
Arguably preferable to being delusional.
I don't think this word means what you think it means. More importantly, nor do Democratic politicians or self-identified leftists in general. Lumping them all together and equating the revolutionary Communist with the status quo corporatist Democrat is a Fox News thing.
A less extreme self-identity, the "progressives", were bemoaning Obama and his attachment to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit" from Clinton's lobbyist-friendly Third Way agenda, as early as 2008. Yes he was a break from the tortured logic and abuses of power that were standard for Bush; Obama was the compromise candidate that was acceptable to progressives and who (positively) did have designs to build a halfway functional healthcare system.
But it seems that that trendline which spent eight years defending some rather insane behavior by the Bush Administration, was not (and is not) finished. We ratchet ever rightwards.
A very large and very public impact on Obama's foreign policy (which is not what he ran on) involved trying to defend himself against constant criticism from a right-wing media machine, which is why it was in large part defined by rightwards-reaching compromises between our foreign policy in 2008, and people like McCain who wanted to start bombing Iran immediately, or people like Greg Abbott who wanted to start shooting at immigrants immediately. What surprised him was that this drew no support. See also: SCOTUS & Garland.
People calling themselves "leftists" and "socialists" today in large part stood up out of dissatisfaction with Obama and the establishment Democrats, and formed a social consciousness during the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
It's all entirely relative and contextual. Your definition is the outlier. Not mine.
You've written a few colorful paragraphs that fail to attack my point that he was a terrible US president.
I don't really care (and you shouldn't either) whether Obama's foreign policy was defensive. It was bad foreign policy, period. And that's on him and the American people who voted him into power. Americans owe much of the US' poor foreign posture today to him and his administration.
_Especially_ after he put his foot on the scale in the 2020 primaries, orchestrating a behind-closed-doors pressure campaign to sharply unify the party's politicians and favorable media around Biden, in order to defeat Sanders.
Along with the drone war and a few other things, it's part of the package of insults that drove a number of people to stop identifying as Democrats or progressives and start identifying as leftists and socialists, which had been largely taboo terminology in the US (and online, "communists", which still is). The only people in the US still widely using "leftist" as an exonym for Democrats are far-right media and their zombie hordes of septuagenarians.
The leftists describe centrist democratic politicians as "liberals" as distasteful pejorative, and the right uses "liberal" as a distasteful pejorative interchangeable with "socialist" and "communist" and "leftist", for anyone and everyone who isn't on the authoritarian ethnonationalist train.
This semantic shift and new leftist discourse has accompanied a slow realization that the things Obama considered politically unachievable given the constraints of the donor class & media environment, were often things with 70% popular support, and 85% popular support among Democrats. That the perception of popularity & professional political support was being wildly warped by corporate/aristocratic power and the GOP political machine. That ranges from socialized medicine to closing Guantanamo to ending wars in the Mideast.
Note that I don’t believe it is a genius 4D chess move, or a particularly well executed version of the strategy. But just because his pronouncements are so ridiculous and impractical, and just plain offensive, and just because he’s an idiot, that still doesn’t mean it’s not a bluff.
It isn't 'bluffing'.
We don't even have a word for what is happening with Gaza, and any illustrative analogy I can come up with would be cribbing the SAW movies.
(I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care, though now I think about it I wonder if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea? If so, or indeed if anyone else in the area can, they also become relevant).
All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
> if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea
They could. Russia bought weapons from Iran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahed_drones) so why no the other way around
Trump, even in his most incandescently orange rage, STILL doesn't make as many nuclear threats as Putin does. He certainly has been unable to imitate Putin domestically.
It's a choice not a "need". It's a revealing choice. Implying Russia "needed" to annex a country is very revealing too. Like if they don't have enough land and or resources already. You know how sparsely populated it is?
Their troops were in fact in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Serbia...
This does not excuse the atrocities and conquest as performed by Russia, while it's true USA does worry about optics much more (i.e. their presence in Serbia was a lot more toned down than in Iraq or Afghanistan, as Serbia is a European "culture" similar to the rest of Europe).
US go-to is "liberating" a territory, which is — interestingly — the same excuse Russia is using in Eastern parts of Ukraine (and which is why it's likely working with most of their own population, obviously helped with media control).
Russia OTOH did indeed use the "liberate" rhetoric wrt Ukraine, but at this point it made it clear that it intends to annex all territory that it can occupy.
It should be noted that the word "liberate" in a military context has a very long history in Russian war propaganda specifically, which is a big reason why they keep using it. It is an immediate call-out to WW2, which has a near-religious status in Russia, but even beyond that, e.g. the 1939 partition of Poland with the Nazis and annexation of West Ukraine and Belarus was also described as "liberation" then.
> All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
Could be, but Russia is currently grinding itself to exhaustion on a fraction of the discretionary budget of NATO countries that are also going "hmm, we can't trust the US any more either, and need to build up our own stockpile…", so I don't see them as being strong enough to be relevant — except by selling nukes.
As for "why not": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
I rather suspect that violations of that particular treaty will be taken very very seriously, something along the lines of the White House saying: "We know Russia sold them to Iran, we're going going to count any Iranian use of them as if Russia used them itself. Tehran nukes our friends in Tel Aviv, means we nuke Moscow." (North Korea, being much smaller and acting like it's constantly under threat from everywhere, might not see any novel risk).
But perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, even for Russia — fait accompli has a way of changing things, and a nuclear armed Iran might make Israel call for international oversight and join the ICC even at the expense of throwing Netanyahu under the metaphorical bus.
Now, Russia has done this already in Georgia: they consider two territories under their occupation independent states, and not part of Russia.
USA does things differently: after establishing military control, it gets local businesses bought out by US companies (investment, right?) while they are struggling, and attempts to influence political landscape.
I'd certainly choose US approach over the other, but ideally, we'd get neither.
How is that relevant and how does that entitle to Taiwain? They started colonizing it at about the same time as the Dutch.
> because it's "God's Promise" ?
That’s not the reason.
The Republic of China then tried to gain international recognition as an independent nation but, to this day, basically nobody recognizes them as such. And eventually this led to the emergence of the 'one country, two systems' where China would allow some basic autonomy to the province, yet it would remain a part of China. This was accepted by most of the world, including the US. While simultaneously we then did (and are doing) absolutely everything possible to ensure the emergence of a new civil war in the region. It's not at all because we care about Taiwan (beyond it being in a strategically useful location), but primarily to weaken and destabilize China.
You can always construct some historical and geographical claims and justifications. Haven't you heard, China is a near Arctic nation now.
They had it until Nixon decided to recognize PRC instead. So “then” kind of ignores 30 preceding years..
> would allow some basic autonomy
It’s hard to even describe how absurd and nonsensical this statement is. You are sure that you are not mixing up Taiwan and Hong Kong or Macau?
humour me then
Calling this chain of events a "CIA coup" is an indication of baffling ignorance of the actual facts. Whoever gave you this "understanding" blatantly lied to you.
[1] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2013-11-27/ukr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titushky
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidan_casualties
[5] https://www.kyivpost.com/post/9002
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_presidential_el...
Several EU countries torpedoed a highly beneficial China-EU trade deal under last-minute USA pressure. Time for a euro maidan?
I don't see any evidence that the CIA counciled Ukraine to avoid war. I see a lot of evidence that they'd push for exactly the opposite. Even if they didn't meddle (which is straight unbelievable), they're cackling with happiness that their buffer state went to war.
If we're talking about the Revolution of Dignity the EU and US sadly didn't care that much and generally advised the opposition to try to compromise with Yanukovych. It was Yanukovych himself who decided to flee and Putin who decided to invade in 2014.
And Ukraine didn't go to war, Russia was the one who invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was merely defending itself. Ukraine tried to find a way to avoid the war, Russia was not interested.
Do you think Putin is a US puppet?
In 2022 Biden repeatedly pointed out that the planned full scale invasion was an even worse even stupider idea. Putin invaded anyway.
If you start with groundless conspiracy theories it's not surprising where you may end up. The CIA had nothing to do with the revolution of dignity, which was a grassroots protest movement or Ukraines government voting to remove the president after he abandoned the country.
Also Ukraine has had 2 fair and free elections since then (Zelensky beat the incumbent by a landslide) unlike Russia or the parts of the country unfortunate enough to be under their control.
A coup was actually carried out by Russia in crimea. An actual coop where Russian soldiers surrounded the local government at gunpoint
> one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians.
This is false and shows you have no knowledge of Ukraine or Russia. Zelensky is from a minority group(Jewish) and is a native Russian speaker the current head of the army is an ethnic russian born in Russia.
That's not to mention how Russia treats ethnic minorities or even ethnic Russians in territories they capture
> This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future.
He invaded because he's an imperialist. It's pretty simple
> All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
You're imagining this was Americas fault. The only thing America could have done differently to prevent the war was if they somehow agreed to defend Ukraine or get all NATO members to agree to let them join.
The US is a state, and like all states it's a sociopath. The reason it's better than others is because it resorts to force later and less often than other states.
It is unironically better this way; your argument implies that having robust systems of law, transnational corporations, and global trade are somehow just as bad as a war of conquest.
That's nuts.
Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to get along with another american or is simply retarded. But I repeat myself. We americans are not a terribly skeptical people and absolutely deserve what we get. Morons. Why bother complaining about fascism if we don't even bother to tear down obviously evil structures like the cia? What is the goddamn point?
The CIA absolutely counciled ukraine. Why would you think otherwise? This is precisely the CIA wheelhouse.
What do you think happened in 2012?
Is there any chance you're just making up everything you say?