There are two things I probably say too often, and despite what you’re about to read, I swear I’m not schizophrenic. Or at least not much.
One is, “Always be wary of political solutions to technical problems.” Another is, “All your base are belong to us.” The first is a VodkaPundit original, the second is an “Engrish” translation from an early ’90s Japanese videogame called “Zero Wing.”
Both came to mind reading today’s sad news about the impending death of privacy in Great Britain, where it was already mortally wounded and waiting for a National Health Service doctor who was trained at Hamza’s Discount Medical Degree Warehouse, and is also completely booked until the 5th of Never.
I posted an all-too-brief item on Instapundit earlier today about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s actions to “turn your smartphone into a government surveillance device,” as the Telegraph’s Zia Yusuf put it, but a topic this important deserves the full VodkaPundit Treatment™.
Calling it “the terrifying endpoint” of Britain’s Online Safety Act (OSA), Starmer’s Labour government will finalize guidance in April of this year on deploying “‘accredited technology’ for scanning messages sent with end-to-end encryption.”
What that means in practice is, London’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) will mandate on-device software able to read everybody’s “private” messages in real-time, and scan their images, too, before any personal encryption tools come into play.
London pinky-swears they’ll only look for CSAM and terrorism-related materials, but as Yusuf put it, “the slippery slope is obvious” and “mission creep is inevitable.” The country looking to ban traditional chef’s knives (really!) in the name of safety simply cannot be trusted with this much digital power.
“All your texts are belong to us,” Starmer says, sounding like a real-life videogame villain. “Pictures, too.”
The Tories are no better, by the way. Britons suffered similar encroachments under Conservative governments, too. In fact, the OSA was brought to Parliament by Tory MP Michelle Donelan serving as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology under Conservative PM Rishi Sunak. London’s war on privacy goes back at least to 2015 under another so-called Conservative PM, David Cameron, who asked, “Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible [for government] to read?”
Starmer’s Labour Party merely builds atop a foundation laid by the Tories.
And you think the Uniparty is bad here? At least Reform UK leader Nigel Farage had the stones to call OSA “borderline dystopian,” although I frankly have no idea what he meant by “borderline.”
Last year, Apple switched off its optional end-to-end cloud storage encryption for British iPhone and Mac users, rather than lie to them that they still had any privacy under OSA and Britain’s similarly Orwellian Investigatory Powers Act. Now as Ofcom threatens to end messaging privacy, too, Foundation for Freedom Online’s Allum Bokhari concluded that “private messaging platforms will simply withdraw from the U.K.” rather than comply.
“At this rate, Brits are going to lose access to X, Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram,” he added. “Starmer’s Great Firewall is going to rival China’s.”
That brings us to the part about being wary of political solutions to technical problems.
CSAM is a real issue — one that Apple and Google have found ways to deal with in-house. Apple uses Communication Safety features (on-device nudity detection in Messages for child accounts, blurring sensitive content without sending data off-device, etc) and reports known CSAM found via other means. Google’s means are server-side and less private (no surprise there), but both companies’ methods are believed to contribute significantly to CSAM detection.
All without Big Brother finding your “baby’s first bath” photos and sending armed goons to your house to take a closer look.
When necessary (and with a warrant) the U.S. government possesses the technology to break into a bad guy’s smartphone. We’ve seen the feds do it before and we’ll see them do it again, and we didn’t need to void the Bill of Rights to make it happen.
But how much easier — and sweeter — it is for Big Brother to have a fully automated The Lives of Others, East German-style dossier on virtually any subject in His Majesty’s dystopian realm.
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Keep tyranny over there, not over here.
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