UK Investigatory Powers bill threatens end-to-end encryption

But some here have claimed that the EU privacy rules would likely apply even to foreign companies that operate in the US, as long as they have users accessing from the EU. If that were to be true then why would this be different and also apply to any company or individual serving EU users from anywhere?
I said I didn’t believe that would be possible, by the way.

You & I know that EU privacy laws will not apply in the US. Same for the UK “requirements” which can only be “requests” outside of the UK.

Obviously both those statements become questionable if a foreign company is in the country in question.

I wonder if they will demand the UK banks to break their encryption so the spooks can monitor banking data without the hassle of getting a warrant to obtain it directly from the bank. I doubt the legislators could even imagine a problem with that.

If Maidsafe Co dared comply with government surveylence I’d be very surprised if they weren’t treated like Microsoft or Google and since SAFE is open source it would be a simple matter to fork to code and simple take the project away from them. Port SAFE, transfer your data and sell your coins to the new unsurveiled network. Complying with the police state would be very unprofitable and be political suicide when dealing with a community that values privacy, security and freedom. That being said the data is all encrypted and isn’t being hosted at any central point. Maidsafe Co do not have access to anyone’s data and therefore cannot release it to anyone. It’s a case of you cannot tell what you do not know.

If a great majority of devs remained, it wouldn’t be that useful. An even worse scenario is where these fascist rules kick in after the SAFE networks goes live:

  • Your (undeleatable) data remains on the original SAFE network
  • SAFE (the coin) crashes (if the other network is any good)
  • You have to repeat the whole investment (buy coins, gain farmer reputation, etc.)

I present the following without a comment.

HB before:

HB today:

I recommend the first thread for better understanding of my (consistent) arguments then and now.

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I would think that once the network is live that any forced breaking of decryption would be rejected by the network, since the hashes would not match. Also why would anyone upgrade to the broken version.

Simply put, the “broken” version would be bypassed and development by others (or the dev team moved elsewhere) would continue.

Also I am unsure how the law would be able to touch a programmer working on open source code hosted outside the UK if the company dissolved in the UK and incorporated in a safe country.

The law seems to apply to UK companies (branches) and allowing the data they collect to be available decrypted to the spooks. Basically the data held by the companies or transmitted/received by the company. So in reality MAIDSAFE the company is not storing any data, they are not communicating any encrypted data to/from customers and only programming. The spooks are free to intercept any of MAIDSAFE’s data transmissions and they can hand over to the spooks all data unencrypted. The SAFE network on the other hand is independent of them. But again even if the government directed MAIDSAFE to break SAFE encryption, see above.

But don’t forget other subtle pieces of info that the devs might need to provide under duress.

But the seed servers are under MaidSafe’s control, aren’t they? Of course at the moment they may be all in the UK and therefore trackable, but it they were in different jurisdictions there may be a situation in which the government would ask for detailed client logs to assist with spying on certain IP’s.

Also, to your point about MaidSafe not storing any data - I completely agree, but then we must consider who is storing data and I claimed in the thread on that court ruling that SAFE gateways or UK based farmers and maybe app vendors may be covered by this law because they do store or encrypt data. It can’t be that neither MaidSafe nor farmers nor app vendors are storing data. Someone could be asked to cooperate or be held responsible. That’s why I call out those who claim that no one is affected by the EU ruling or this UK law.

I am not worried about any of this, by the way. I am assuming we’re just discussing what would be possible (if highly unlikely) in case such law existed.

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Me:

I doubt being open source would protect MaidSafe Limited from being “required” to do something with software that they create and upload to the internet.

Obviously my use of quotes above was not clear enough, but I did make it clear in the same post that I was not worried that this law would be able to do damage to SAFEnetwork because a) David / MaidSafe would find ways to avoid this, including perhaps relocating, and b) because being a decentralised open source project any changes they were forced to make would be ineffective.

So, please @neo realise that I agree that SAFEnetwork will remain SAFE. I don’t however think that means we can ignore legislation like this, no matter how impractical we think it. Governments do awful things, and they get to do them when populations become complacent, or think they can’t or won’t be able to do them.

Google, by the way, never stopped operating in China. They refused to comply with the censorship, and so stopped offering Google Search while maintaining their other businesses - which is where they make a lot of money. Also, last week they announced plans to reverse that original decision.

It is naive to think the US, or the UK, or the EU cannot and do not influence each other, and that laws and court rulings in one place do not have effects in other places. We are all connected. That is the point of my OP and comments on this thread. I’m not staying the IP bill is death for SAFEnetwork, but if we become complacent we increase those risks. We can’t afford to be complacent about any part of this, or any law or court ruling, regardless of jurisdiction.

BTW yesterday a US judge finally stopped the illegal NSA mass surveillance programme revealed by Snowden over two years ago.

On the same day, a Belgian court ruled that facebook has 48 hours to stop tracking Belgian non-facebook users because it says it needs their consent.

@janitor I think it is often more important to you to try and score points against people on this forum, than it is to work together for the things that unite us here. I think you’ve been doing that much less lately though, and me too. I’d much rather work with you for the good of the project, and while I share some of your characteristics in ways that can make it difficult for us to do this, I’d like you to know that I’m always looking for a way to set aside those characteristics and differences so that we can cooperate, at least in areas we both agree on and value, even though we will always have differences.

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Well there’s the solution right there: say it’s the UK farmers who have to comply with the laws. Considering how the government’s attempt to regulate bittorrent went, that would perhaps be the kindest way ever to tell a government to go **** itself.

Which means that the NSA will continue to do exactly what it does now through some loophole or underground with protection provided by the feds.

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yesterday a US judge finally stopped the illegal NSA mass surveillance programme revealed by Snowden over two years ago.

HAHAHAHAHA. If you really believed that, I got bad news for you. That really cracked me up. Good one though.

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True that!

Plan B is clear: now that the outrage is too big they have to temporarily (until the first major incident) cut down on spying, so it’s up to tech companies to cooperate with the government but only if they want to (wink wink).

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People around the world have been breaking copyright laws for years now because of the internet and bittorrent. Governments are helpless to stop this behaviour because it’s empowered by software. IMO, SAFEnet is bittorrent on steroids and governments will not be able to stop it.

But I’ve heard the average lawyer in the US and even average politician that wasn’t in the pocket (probably some years back) hates the idea of protecting the labels etc. Its probably the average judge too. Almost all of them believe in fair use and open access. The industry has to hunt hard for shills. If only we had a public way better than boycotts and tech obsolesce of getting rid of nuisance businesses and business players. The public should be able to break up AT&T again without much regard for the investors. If you invest in Comcast or AT&T you should get what you’ve got coming.

Is that sarcasm? I’m not very good at detecting such apparently. In the end, it doesn’t matter what the average lawyer, judge, or bureaucrat thinks - many governments are pushing for strong and tighter copyright law. Note, there are two links below.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/wikileaks-releases-tpp-agreement-which-gives-more-rights-to-film-studios-over-copyright/story-fnjwneld-1227569821603

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership_intellectual_property_provisions

Can I just mention https://savethelink.org/? Established print publishers are lobbying the EU to have links restricted, censored and even taxed.

Please add your voice to OpenMedia’s campaign against these measures.

It wasn’t the publishers but the statist “progressive” voters and the government.
Who has been ordering Google to remove links to certain search results and why? The publishers?

Different case. The attacks come from both sides.

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No, it’s coming only form one side, the government, and it’s directed primarily against Google.
In the both cases (anti-competition publishers and the backward progressives), those who are pushing for this are anti-market statists.

In fact it is really funny that the same “progressive” individuals who are arguing for the removal of links they don’t like are also arguing for the freedom to link to whatever they please.

No not sarcasm they don’t like it because its illogical, and ultimately fraudulent criminal in intent and result.