News Home Secretary calls for an end to encryption

Lately female politicians are not being the best advertisement for women in politics are they? And it's a crying shame.
This woman was assigned by T. May herself, so no wonder she has such views, and she, like always, once worked for JPMorgan, it seems like these days every cabinet member all over the planet either worked for JPmorgan or Goldman-Sach at some point. I'm sure it's all coincidence..

It's funny too, you'd think people in the big finance circles would insist on encryption so they and their pals can hide their foul machinations. But I guess it doesn't matter anymore if the people find out "whitewashed for murderous cartels and terrorist? No problem" "also for slave traders and holders? Not really a problem either."

 

It doesn't help that most people don't seem to know what encryption is whereas they know what knives and cars are, saying you want to ban knives and cars because the attacker used those would be a stupid thing to say but saying you want to ban something most people don't understand seems perfectly OK.

Pcmji Lhya qf pxvi <That apparently needs to be banned even though i used this web site to encrypt it, here's the key if anyone is interested in what it says (pqlfrunvxinmdjh)

 

I have to disagree there, I think of the various degrees a person could have history is one that is actually very fitting for such a position.
And I'd hate to think what you'd get if there were degrees in 'home secretary' since then you'd get an ugly kind of stagnation and elitism worse than what you see now.
I think her unsuitability lies elsewhere, and it's not her history degree. I'm sure there are people who also have a history degree that would be much better for the job, but of course not liked by May.

 

The point I'm trying to make there is not you need a relevant degree but rather you need relevant understanding/experience.

I have a friend who has A levels in philosophy, psychology and public services and if I was ever trapped in a house fire or something similar I'd want him to be apart of the team working to save me, not because of his formal education but because he spent several years being a firefighter.

I'm a biochemist by education, I having a deep working knowledge of several diseases and their treatments. I know the exact mode of action are site of action for several major medicines but no one should come to me for medical advice because I'm not a doctor. I have no understanding or experience in translating my knowledge into an actionable and effective treatment for a patient who is as far removed from my ideal lab models as could be possible.

Sure there are probably people with history degree's who would be great for that position but most likely they've worked in one of those fields directly and so have a working knowledge of the sector and its challenges.

 

This is true, and perhaps points a wider flaw in society in terms of understanding how local politicians effect the national scene.

I'm personally of the opinion that we should elect local politicians who then vote on our behalf to elect a national government who will best serve the whole population.

I.E I vote for a local politician Y who will stand on my behalf for things like encouraging an environment where engineering is competative. so companies 1 and 2 who are big employers locally can afford to compete on a global stage while keeping their production in the country. This politician then votes for person X who is an economics expert who understands how to balance a competitive market for the employer to a market that also protects the worker while not negatively impacting other sectors for the sole gain of one.

As opposed to currently where I vote for politician A who stands for protecting engineering and manufacturing who then gets into a position where they are in charge of national policy. They then skew and favour policy changes which benefit engineering and manufacture but does so at the expense of another sector e.g finance.

By no means is this a really fleshed out idea, there are a few obvious flaws, but I think something along that kind of line would be far better instead of a single party that favour one socio-economic group of the population over another.

 

Unless you were being rhetorical and it went over my head, isn't this technically what we do already?

 

We currently directly vote in the national government every 4 years. We say we want this party who have put forward these people for several roles.

What I'm saying is we vote locally for out local politician who then goes on to vote for XYZ experts into those same roles. These experts don't have to be affiliated with any one party and ideally would be independent of any party.

Again my suggestion isn't a completely worked out solution just an alternative style that correctly implemented I believe would serve us better.

Ultimately its about getting people who are actual experts/have significant experience and a proven track record of good results into positions such as home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer etc etc. Maybe then we can avoid these knee jerk reactions and responses that are so often detrimental to the masses.

 

As a person with a long term employment history with Edgeware Road station i have to ask a simple question.

At what point do you want your country to stop in their efforts to stop one of your family ending up under a pile of bodies screaming for their mother or father.

To stop my ten year old ending up on an exploding train i would ban end to end encryption for messaging software in a heartbeat.

 

If the ban would actually provide safety and if the ban was technically feasible and if the ban was enforceable no one would disagree.

But none of those three criteria will be met.

 

Then it open doors for malware writers to exploit non-secure messaging and harvest personal information, spam and identity theft.

 

We'd best ban pen and paper then

 

Until Whatsapp type messengers stop supplying part of a bombers toolkit banning them is the only way forward.

Nearly twenty countries have already come to that conclusion

 

Terrorism and people dying existed before encryption. You might want to look up the list of countries that banned VoLP and Whatsapp, and decide whether anti-terrorism is their main motivation.

 

And China, one of the countries banned Whatsapp still suffered terrorist attacks.

 

I don't want them to stop, however it certainly raises the question of why the government, and yourself, are being so hyperbolic when your chance of dying from a terrorist attack in the UK is 1 in 17 million, you've got more chance of dying from taking a selfie than a terrorist attack so why aren't you and politicians calling for a ban on those?

If you can point me to a single terrorist attack that would have been prevented by doing so i might consider the validity of banning end-to-end encryption for billions of law abiding citizens in an attempt to catch a single bad guy, whom BTW would simply move to another way of communicating covertly the moment the messaging software is no longer secure, most likely they'd use ISIS's own encrypted chat app and I'm not sure how you'd go about banning that, even if you managed to ban it what's to stop them using a pen and paper or even one of the many websites that demonstrate how encryption works.

 

No more effective than banning red crayons to stop them from being used to write death threats.

 

Do people not use letters cut from newspapers any more?

 

The point was simply that there are tons of different ways to write something, so banning one specific way to write wouldn't achieve squat.

 

Dying in such a manner is awful. However, there is on average over one pedestrian road death per week in London alone.

Generally terrorism works because of the fear induces, not the relative physical danger it poses to an individual. It's kinda in the name.
If in response to it you start disproportionately eroding basic freedoms in the name of security then we all lose.

There is a indeed a point at which I want my country to stop efforts to protect us from danger at all costs and I think one should be able to have an adult discussion about that without unnecessary appeal to fear/emotion.