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- cross-posted to:
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Today The UK Parliament Undermined The Privacy, Security, And Freedom Of All Internet Users::The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online. In reality, the OSB will lead to a much more censored, locked-down internet for British users. The bill could empower the government to undermine not just the…
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HUGE oof. Get your grandparents out of office and put some people who know how technology works in
They knew it wasn’t feasible but made it law anyways and passed it to ofcom to generate the guidelines for these companies to follow.
Absolutely incredible.
I thought they pushed this back a few weeks ago when they realized it wasn’t plausible?
Or is it a case of ‘the law is here for when it is plausible’, which it never will be?
The absolutely hilarious thing about this is that all of these MPs that clamoured for this bill because “Won’t somebody think of the children!” are up to all sorts of terrible behaviour and a whole bunch of them are on Signal.
Why all internet users and not “just” those in the UK?
VPNs: exist
At more length: the internet is incredibly complicated and interrelated. It’s actually extremely difficult to draw clear national boundaries in terms of one web service or another, and the result is honestly never going to be 100% accurate.
And the same day stirred up a shit storm about watering down climate commitments, surely coincidence…
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66857551
Unfortunately they are likely looking to both destroy free communication and the climate, and not just using it as a ruse… They’re psychotic.
Yeah, that sounds like something they’d do.
I wouldn’t worry about this too much. Today they announced they’re no longer implementing a bunch of things they just made up, like forcing people to car share, and something about demanding people to use a minimum of seven bins…
Tomorrow they will probably state that they’re banning lemons, or insisting that people are only allowed to talk with a French accent when ordering pastries.
Sorry Brits, but I think this is a good time for Lemmy and pretty much any site that cares about privacy block the entirety of the UK. 😞
Sites and services outside the UK should not comply. If UK ISPs block sites outside the UK for not complying, so be it.
Nah, I think global sites should just block access from the UK. Let’s see how the politicians like it when facebook, etc, stop working.
Ultimately the problem is that extradition treaties are a thing. While it’s one thing for a company to ignore a law in a country they don’t “operate” in, if you provide services in that country, you are technically subject to its laws, and if they decide to force the situation you could find yourself arrested in your home country and sent to face trial or even serve a prison sentence in another country. Technically your home country could refuse to extradite you, but that has all kinds of political ramifications and so unless you’re someone very powerful in your home country it’s unlikely the state will step in in your favor. The safest bet is simply to block all access from a specific country, and then if pressed you can simply say “we did our best to prevent access from your country and do not provide service there, anyone accessing our service from that country is circumventing our restrictions and there’s nothing we can do about that”, which is probably good enough to torpedo any case against you.
I’ve never ONCE heard of someone being extradited FROM their home country. I know for a fact there’s strong precedent of refusals.
So, I went and did some research and while some countries do exempt their own citizens from extradition the US and the UK are not one of the ones those apply to. In the event that a country does block extradition of their own citizens they typically will try the person in their own courts instead. However while looking into this I found something else out about extradition I didn’t know, which is that most extradition treaties require that the offense committed has to be a crime in both jurisdictions, so it wouldn’t apply in this case anyway. There are also exemptions for “political crimes” although that’s a rather vague term, and once again doesn’t apply in this particular case. Lastly it seems like most extradition treaties only apply to crimes that carry a minimum 1 year jail sentence, so you’re not getting extradited for littering or something like that.
The interesting bit I learned is that there are generally two kinds of extradition treaties. One kind lists a specific subset of crimes that the treaty applies to. In theory, you wouldn’t need both countries to consider the act a crime in that case, as a country could request an extradition treaty for something the other country doesn’t consider a crime, but the odds of the other country agreeing to such a treaty are pretty slim. The other kind of treaty is what most countries currently use which is an agreement that for things both countries consider to be a crime, if the offense occurred in another country then the accused will be extradited to that jurisdiction for prosecution.
