Comment by jonathanstrange

1 year ago

You're right I shouldn't have used the adjective "totalitarian." It was the kind of mindless parroting of phrases that I dread myself, so thank you for pointing that out! The UK has extremely strict surveillance laws, which are incompatible with EU legislation by now, so it's not a typical example of European countries in that respect. That's all I meant to say.

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jonathanstrange

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foldr  1 year ago

Are you referring to this? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-co...

If so, that was a judgment about legislation that is no longer current (and wasn’t when the judgment was issued). It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.

  • jonathanstrange  1 year ago

    No, I didn't talk about court judgments. Yes, I had various aspects of the Regulation of the Investigatory Powers Act and recent additions to the Investigatory Powers Act in mind.

    > It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.

    Quite possibly but that wasn't my point. The point is that the UK is by far more of a surveillance state than any EU country, at least to my knowledge. UK legislation is not typical for a European country in that respect. People can go to prison in the UK for not handing over an encryption password and the UK has just effectively banned end-to-end encryption (if you put a backdoor in it, it's no longer end-to-end encryption).