“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
Friedrich A. von Hayek
I don't mean this as a slight against anyone from the UK, this applies to most countries, but it seems to me as though the UK especially has gotten to the point where as soon as something happens, everyone panics and immediately runs to the government for protection and support.
Is that too harsh? Maybe, but it's happening basically everywhere else as well. It just seems to me that the people in Britain in particular are becoming increasingly complacent about their country becoming more of a surveillance state of security theater.
I say this as someone from the UK - what on earth happened?
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Don't vote tory. sorted.
edit: slightly politics but screw it, they need to be voted out. Not from the UK but the stuff they do has an effect on Ireland too, they need to go.
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Let me play devils advocate. The other countries lie and capture all of the information, practice propaganda against their own citizens, and manipulate access to information through embedded government agents.
Isn't China and now the UKs honesty at least refreshing?
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As someone from the UK from what I've seen from those around me, people don't care what's being put through law wise as long as they don't see an impact on their day to day routine.
Recent conversations with people have also shown me that when something bad happens, they are willing to denounce the very things put in place to protect them. So that they have the feeling of being safe and secure despite how false that security is.
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I hope this is all grandstanding for votes, there is no debate or education stuff is just forced out to "consumers" who expect its all good. Politics, hardware. Its all "magic" to ignorant people.
I hope we have more sence than to end up as controlled idiots.
I'm British, English whatever that means now.
I try explaining tech to my wife, shes not interested.. She said the other day to turn the room lights up as her laptop screen was dark, I could not get her to understand that light comes out of the screen not from the room lights.
I call her phone a dork box. as she is always playing some poke poke bobble bubble game or other as it listens to our conversations and survails our house.
This fast paced tech revolution has some very bad side effects. especially if control is given to the self important state.
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The sad thing is what will happen when the conservatives lose power, and this kind of shit is in place.
Pretty soon you'll have people being put in prison for "hate speech" or "crimes against the party", or as it's more properly known, thought crime.
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Pretty sure they can do that today if you piss them off enough.
You should have showed her that you can turn up or down the brightness of the screen.
George Orwell's warnings were, indeed, prescient.
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In the UK maybe. In the US even the KKK is protected by the first amendment. They're actually about to hold a rally in Virginia in Charlottesville to protest the removal of several civil war era monuments, and the renaming of several parks.
I can understand why, because our wonderful government here in VA has decided not only to rename this parks, but to rename them in a way that is effectively trolling. Turning a park named after a confederate general into "diversity" or "justice" park.
The left seems to have forgotten that historical revisionism and the destruction of culture are something that simply breeds more hate. This in particular is a very complicated issue but the news and the left paint it simply as about racism and slavery. (although the KKK is hardly unbiased lol)
I guess what I am saying, we need to start explaining to people if not teaching kids at a young age "being offended does not make you a victim of something. You do not have a right to not be offended"
Yes I did do that, it was more the total lack of interest in how it worked as an example. I'm still not sure the light comes out of the screen has sunk in. but she ended up with it set brighter ( I like my screens set low, I probably altered it before)
Pressing the Fn button and increase brigtness is not something she will know as its very rare she need to do any thing to her "tech stuff" as she just calls me to set it up and her needs are only browsing emails stuff like that.
She is not stupid just home and work she calls tech support for everything 
I enjoy my tin foil hat as much as the next geek. I play with vpn, tor, pgp but mostly I'm just talking to myself because no one else on the planet has any interest in privacy, anonymity, or security.
Being a Canadian citizen, we have had electronic listening posts across the north since before I was born (I'm old - or at least that's what my wife tells me). We passed bill C51 here that requires our ISPs to hold all metadata, email, etc for law enforcement purposes. Our telcos and small number of ISPs cooperate with law enforcement. I would guess that any company in Canada that was asked to turn on logging by a law enforcement agency with a writ would do so immediately, including any vpn server hosted in this country.
All of these statements seem entirely reasonable to me. Privacy from foreign government spying is a real issue with almost all of our data bouncing across the border and being openly collect by the US. It makes the idea of storing corporate data offsite questionable in many cases if you are serious about your customers privacy. Most organizations outside of governments are not.
So at the end of the day do I really care whether tax dollars are wasted on internal surveillance?
It's a bad use of money and it hasn't been shown to reduce violent crime. On the other hand it's really fun. It keeps mathematicians employed. Big data is tremendously cool. If we could get the US to provide free data storage and recovery services it would be way nicer than dropbox/googledrive/onedrive plus the NSA search engines can probably give google a real run for their money on searching all the metadata on all the files I've ever used.
Personal Search with the ability to do analysis on your own or companies data. That would be an awesome free service.
I'd like to be the first to sign up for the NSA's new free data storage/high speed ISP/and celll phone network.
The results are here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/election-2017-40171454
Conservatives failed to get majority but i don't know if that's going to stop her from attacking all things technology related.