Everyone in the tech industry facepalms almost every time legislators try to pontificate on technology, but the British government appears...
The government is suggesting that it might ban some Apple security updates. Under the latest plans, tech companies would need to notify the British government before rolling out a security fix but might be refused permission if it blocks a vulnerability that’s being exploited by security services.
Totally. We've had a few decades now of successive governments that have taken increasingly centralising attitudes towards privacy and civil liberties - essentially going back to the 1980s.
But the one bright spot in there was the 2010-15 Coalition, who abolished Labour's biometric ID scheme (people forget now, but the Brown government had passed legislation that meant that, if they'd won the 2010 election, then we would all have needed to register for these), deleted innocent people's DNA records from the police DNA database, halved the maximum length of time the police could detain people without charging them with any crime (from 28 to 14 days - after Labour has earlier tried to increase it to 90), etc. The Coalition was the one truly liberalising government of my lifetime and that's entirely a consequence of the Lib Dems' role in driving its agenda.
Lib dem who sold out their vote voters for the illusion of power.
The greens don't stand here (the Scottish greens are a separate party from the one in eng/wales) the etc tend not to stand here with the possible exception of ukip and fringe people that are some how more insane
Independence issues notwithstanding, the SNP seem to have a pretty authoritarian streak of their own, especially under Yousef. Their attitude to free speech is quite lacking.
No shit it's almost like I said that in another coment probably over an hour ago responding to someone else making the same comment.
But the reality of the situation is qe at best have a 2.5 party system with lib dem ensuring the tories get in when Labour can't quite get an outright majority.
Yep. Unfortunately I have no doubt that Labour would also implement something like this too, they didn't have a good track record for civil liberties when they were in power.
It took place in Britain because it was written by a British author for British audiences. It was written at a time when totalitarianism (both fascist and socialist) was a major threat in the world outside Britain.
IngSoc wasn't meant to suggest that Britain was somehow uniquely vulnerable to totalitarianism. It was meant to be a warning to Britons of how the totalitarianism that we could see dominating continental Europe and Russia at the time could also hypothetically develop here - IngSoc was meant to be a sort of 'totalitarianism with British characteristics'.