Hmm… I may be mistaken but can they not already arrest troublemakers, arsonists, violent/aggressive individuals and other sort of rioters/agitators with preexisting laws/bylaws/regulations ?
On the other hand, I’m trying to see the silver lining here… perhaps this new law will make it difficult for agent provocateur¹ from operating without repercussions and anonymity unless the law specifically has a carve out for them (I wouldn’t be too surprised, but it would be another major blow to the resiliency of democracy in the United Kingdom).
The future I want to foresee is one where everybody runs and keeps their data locally (or their dedicated VPS):
- where everyone has access to at least 10Gbps symmetric fiber optic connection to the internet at their home/apartment at affordable price (doesn’t have to be unlimited, but pricing per TB of bandwith usage needs to be less than USD $1 as it is the actual cost of operating & peerage)
- whereas net neutrality is a prerequisite to any corporation/organization/government/municipality getting network backbone peerage with other network operators
- whereas registering to a website or service actually creates a local secure database/bucket/pod where that website/service organizes/sort/manipulates our data and stores all generated modified data/metadata within our local personnal server, every time we interact with that same external website/service it gets access to the database/bucket previously created. Look into the Solid protocol specification to get a better idea (it doesn’t have to be that specific protocol)
- whereas FIDO2 or WebAuth or their successor is widely accepted for passkey implementation or just multifactor authentication
- whereas all communications are direct peer-to-peer without transiting third party servers (as in not managed by either communicating party)
Moreover, even better would be to teach everyone from elementary school various concepts (from simpler to more complex gradually) of science, programming, critical thinking and empathy.
If I may dare to push even further, with technology (secure authentication, work from home familiarity, collaborative softwares, digital signing, distributed version control), give every citizen (from the age of 12 or earlier; because one has to start learning early to make mistakes, understand and form good habits) the ability to vote/abstain on every proposition, motion, new/modified law and decision regarding their own country. Have a publicly accessible historical account of every vote by everyone (excluding secret ballots obviously). Most importantly, every year end, 4 years, 10 years, 25 years, 60 years have a collective review/retrospective of past motions/decisions that were implemented and let everyone vote on if those were overall beneficial or harmful for the country/state/municipality. Empower those who tend to regularly vote and tend to historically vote beneficially (at least 70% of their votes after they reached 25 years old) for the country/state/municipality to become a local representative.
I know it’s getting wordy and perhaps a bit complicated but keep up with me. Give accredited/qualified individual in very specific fields the retractable/overridable power to have their votes on certain very specific motion/law/decision be inherited by active delegation by any other citizens up to a limit of ~290 (Bernard–Killworth number) per qualified inviduals. For example, a citizen could separetely delegate his/her votes:
- relating to healthcare to their own family doctor if they like/respect their judgment or even a familly member who is licensed for medical practice, it doesn’t matter who as long as they are qualified for the subject matter
- relating to renovating a specific bridge to their neighbor who is a general contractor or their nephew who is a civil engineer
- relating to military procurement to their veteran uncle still with a sharp mind and keenly informed with world event or even their weekly indoor hockey teammate who is a unstoppable adventurer exploring every part if the world but also a office worker and a reservist
All while always preserving the option to change their vote anytime for any reason; by delegating to someone else for specific issue/concerns or voting on their own (always takes priority over delegation).
Well… I am being too hopeful and probably pushed things far beyond what is realistic, but it is nice to make thought experiments on what may be possible with technology.
I have a fairly generic full name. Searching me online comes up with everything else but anything actually about myself. So many people of all ages have my name I was pretty surprised.
Moreover, I kept myself off of Facebook and most social media including all those meetup/dating/influencer/vlogging apps.
However, a few friends, colleagues and familly may have a few inadvertent cameos of me in their photos/videos. Which I do not mind, as they are unavoidable in day to day life.
Overall, I have taken mesures to leave as much of a messy digital footprint I can with things totally unrelated to me, my preferences and my knowledge.
We can’t really have complete and true privacy in our modern age with big data, “vacuum” everything/anything and decrypt later, deep learning and multi-domain tracking/inference. We can at least consciously (by choosing more privacy aware services, or by choosing to not give any/all our info) and unconsciously (through automation, scheduling of unrelated “activity” generation and mixing of different activities with others on the same profile or tracking token) leave a noisy footprint of ourselves and others.
Ah, I suppose it’s TOTP/HOTP or HMAC challenge.
I am waiting for FIDO2 to work between keepassxc and yubikey. 🥳