So what exactly happens if they catch me using Element in the UK?
Nothing. As per usual this law hasn’t been thought out by the people in trying to inact it.
The law requires companies to introduce back doors into their systems. Most of the companies will officially just no longer offer their service in the UK.
There is an absolutely no provision under the current law to do anything about individual citizens or foreign nationals who circumvent (use a VPN) these rules. So basically you’re fine to just carry on as usual and pretend the law doesn’t exist.
What will the UK government do about that? Nothing, because the companies don’t (won’t) officially have any presence in the UK, so there isn’t much pressure that can be put on them, and I highly doubt other countries are going to accommodate them, as they are been ridiculous.
You might say that the government will ban VPNs but firstly that is problematic for companies, and secondly I don’t think they actually know VPN’s exist as a thing anyway.
The UK is close to separating itself from the internet.
Guess the UK better get used to seeing “We’re sorry, [AppName] is no longer available on your country.”
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I don’t know if meta or telegram cares enough about encryption to lose UK market
Neither Telegram nor Facebook Messenger is E2E encrypted by default. Maybe they’d just disable the option for E2E encryption for both senders and recipients in the UK.
It’s going to be terribly difficult to run two different apps on mobile app stores. If Telegram gives access to the UK government to backdoor eavesdrop then that essentially means its available in the entire app. Any app that does this means I’m not using it.
Bad actors are already commiting crimes, they will have no trouble “illegally” using encryption software to keep their message hidden. Encryption is just math, you cannot stop a computer from performing an encryption algorithm.
You can however “make it illegal” for software to do this, what just results in normal citizens having unencrypted communication, while people who are up to no good are still encrypting their stuff.
🤦
Or just stealing someone’s phone, doing whatever they want to do, toss it in a river, and not have anything traced back to them
Which is the point. They want to spy on everybody.
Yeah they know that. The whole “let’s stop criminals and terrorists” bit is just an excuse.
The conservative government in the UK is really weird and they actually want to be a dictatorship, but they’re just not very good at it. I have no idea why they are doing this.
The thing is it’s also unlikely to achieve that objective as well because they highly likely to be voting out of power next year. So basically this is a pointless law in every possible regard.
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