Comment by tim333
15 days ago
Brit here. Yeah from my experience people don't care. Hardly anyone gets prosecuted and those who do have often done something bad.
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.
Brit here.
> 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.
It is true, the British do tend to submit to authority. Questioning authority is considered poor taste, bad manners.
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.
Unfortunately, I suspect this is true. The British public does have an authoritarian bent, with a side helping of “rules are for other people, this couldn’t possibly impact me at some point”.
Today, maybe, even so it probably depends on who you ask.
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.
I'm not sure "giving your rights away" quite sums up the process. It's more as a Brit, and probably most of us, weren't even aware this bill was happening - the government passes many pages of dull legislation - but if it proves a pain you can always vote for whoever offers to repeal it. I suspect the encryption law vs Apple is going to result in the government backing down to some extent.
We did rebel over ID cards. Passed in 2006, repealed in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
Plenty of people have been jailed in the uk for not providing pins or passwords.