Boggart Blog has been warning about this since our first incarnation in 2005. Socialism always leads to fascism, as economist Josef Schumpeter warned back in the 1930s and twenty - one years ago it was clear to us Boggart Bloggers, an IT consultant, an accountant and an aerospace engineer, that the government of the day, led by Tony Blair at the time, was intent on using internet technologies as a tool for social engineering and the destruction of individual liberty.
At the time the technology existed for tracking and electronic surveillance of our every action and movement via online technology, but it was not as advanced and did not have the ubiquity of the smartphone. To put a tracker device in the pockets of 90% of the population and set up the networks and data centres to gather, collate and store the data would have been prohibitively costly.
But not any more ...
In the article from which we reproduce an extract below the author discusses the UK government's plans, in collaboration with Silicon Valley black hat actors Google and Apple to introduce mandatory client side scanning on smartphones, giving tech companies and government agencies powers to read and record every message or internet session users are involved in. They justify this exercise in trampling on constitutional rights and liberties by claiming it is to protect children from accessing harmful material
It is no coincidence that simultaneously the Socialist government is working with tech firms on plans to make what they call 'misinformation and disinformation' (i.e. anything the government does not want you to see, hear or read,) posted online invisible to user. All levels of government deny this is a blatant attack on free speech of course.
And we must not forget, though it is on hold at the moment due to a public opinion backlash, Reichsfuhrer Starmer's favourite sacred cow project, mandatory Digital ID is still part of his manifesto.
Authored by Stephen Green via PJMedia.com,
In George Orwell's 1984, Great Britain was just a province of Oceania named "Airstrip One" as a none-too-subtle nod to the U.K.'s role as host to the heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II.
Four decades past the real 1984, and there's still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone's smartphone to government supervision — and jail time for tech execs who don't submit.
You had to figure this was probably coming, right?
Right.
Reclaim the Net reports that "Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison."
That might sound all well and good, but as usual, For the Children™ is little more than the government's justification for total surveillance.
"You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time," Reclaim noted, with nudity serving as "the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize."
The industry term is "client-side scanning," which sounds much nicer than "a government mandated app that looks at everything on your phone all the time."
And even that sounds better than "Big Brother is Watching You," which is exactly what it is.
As already required by Britain's Online Safety Act, Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates.
No, it can't be uninstalled.
As I reported in January, what this means in practice is that London's Office of Communications ("Ofcom" in Newspeak) mandates on-device software able to read everybody's "private" messages in real-time and scan their images, too, before any personal encryption tools come into play.
London pinky-swears that it'll only look for CSAM and terrorism-related materials, but as the Telegram's Zia Yusuf put it back then, "the slippery slope is obvious" and "mission creep is inevitable."
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
