Comment by mark_l_watson
15 days ago
What is up with the UK? I have always loved my British friends and appreciated England’s history (setting aside their brutality during the British Empire). I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc. I just hope we in the USA don’t follow their lead.
Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
We're governed by the most technically inept people possible.
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.
So at least we don't have to worry about anything. Apple can give them access to LLM generated SQLite rows and call it a day. Nobody would notice.
The USA strongarming us after 9/11 didn't help. You don't have to look beyond the borders of the US to answer "what's up with the UK" when it comes to eg terrorism legislation
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
> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc.
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
Yes but no, post WW2 the UK was one of the most liberal places in the world. Somehow things took a turn in the past two decades or so. And then around the 2020s the decline started to rapidly accelerate. The stories that have come out lately are really insane.
Economic decline fuels resentment towards immigrants and minority communities. Government becomes increasingly repressive to keep tensions from boiling over into riots and perhaps worse. This is why countries are obsessed with growth - many things can be papered over with sufficient growth.
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You can’t really put the UK surveillance state on a political left right axis though. Its an orthagonal trend where various Britains have always been trying to monitor each other for various purposes and that’s why it grows and grows. At least that’s how it looks to me as an outsider.
the UK has been ahead of the US on anti-liberal policies for the past decade or more.
bexit came before the trump election
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They wanted to execute Thomas Paine so I'd say about then
all started after our guns were taken
Perhaps. Another possibility is that the same societal shift that drove the UK to give up the right to be armed also pushed them in the direction of giving up other rights.
They broke Enigma code, and since then their spy agencies have overweight influence?
Poland broke the Enigma code .. and built the first Bombes.
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
Not quite right.
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.
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> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc.
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.
The war on terror was a big thing in the UK long before 2001—largely because there was in fact quite a lot of terrorism going on there, to be clear.
30 years of US funded bombings across the U.K. stopped in 2001 so there’s that.
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UK probably went wrong when they left the EU, which since then has done some work on data protection laws. Leaving the EU will probably turn out a mistake, but they could have, in some areas made it a positive thing. They could have made even stronger data protection and privacy laws for their citizen. They could have enforced them more than the EU enforces GDPR. These things do not happen because of uninformed and corrupt politicians. Trade is of course another area, where they could have tried to ensure, that they stick to EU quality and safety controls, to avoid lots of drama and headache. But it was difficult anyway, because if you stick to all things EU, then why leave in the first place? They would have to uphold standards and improve upon them, while being in a weaker position to negotiate with outside of EU partners.