Steganography is extremely far from undetectable, unfortunately. And trivial to find out once you know its there; if we ever allow a framework to be put in place to intercept communication at a large scale, it will be the inverse of the cat and mouse game we have with encryption : very hard to improve, very easy to detect.

And I’m aware of the many funky things we did. At some point people tunneled DNS queries through HTTPS, to get through wifi captive portal that only allowed HTTPS traffic until authenticated.

Just to be clear, I’m aware of the issues of detecting stealth data, and even detecting encryption against seemingly random data. It’s kinda fascinating to detect the difference, too; some people have looked into that. But the point is, if you’ve already agreed on “banning encrypted communication that can’t be listened to easily”, you can basically just say “this is gibberish, decrypt it or get to jail”. I also know that this sounds insane and throw away the “innocent until proven guilty” principle, but we’re slowly creeping toward a world where our device scans all our document and communication to notify of issues to a central authority, where black box in large networks are already present, and so on.

It’s been slowly creeping toward that. Finding way to hide traffic on public networks can only go so far if the listener can just stop you if it detect what looks like encrypted content.

And, since this is kind of a heated discussion, I’ll reiterate: it would be batshit crazy to go this way. But I would have found batshit crazy to have our own devices spy on us and report suspicious activities to third parties years ago, and yet here we are.

Honk honk

Now it’s a circus!

Just about every serious commentator in the tech and business spheres find a total VPN ban to be extremely unlikely, despite the rumblings of a few geriatric Parliamentarians. More leaders in the UK have publicly stated that banning VPNs is not on the table and that they have legitimate uses.

Restricting something for children is not the same as so doing for adults. Society already does in a number of ways (driving, smoking, alcohol etc.).

Enforcing a complete ban would be extremely difficult technically and would do serious harm economic harm and undermine cybersecurity. The government is not going to do that out of “spite” despite your generalized anti-government sentiments. Restrictions on kids is not a VPN ban, which would be catastrophic and frankly impossible in the UK. It’s not China. Not only does the UK have different standards and not only do they lack the strangle hold China has, a governing party in the UK would face repercussions for the economic devastation and be voted out of power. As I stated before, in democracies at least, politicians care about the economy because voters care about it, usually more than anything else.

Push for government-sanctioned client-side spyware already happened years ago with the intent to scan all content and keeps happening every other year, each time with more support

Any serious attempt to implement CSS would be met with fierce opposition from constituents and the industry. Not too mention the economic fallout and technical infeasibility. These are the reason any such proposals have consistently been discarded. It’s worth it to pay attention, sure. And to push back if they ever really try. But the odds of it happening are low.

each time with more support

That’s not really true. At best, support fluctuates. Amongst some lawmakers and law enforcement, you’d probably see a higher level of support but those are pretty much it. Media headlines overstate it because it gets views.

there’s constant harassment to tech company for them to create backdoor for spying on demand

Maybe but I think many of them would stop operating in the UK rather than take such a major hit to their reputation globally. This very thread is about companies refusing to operate in the UK. Apple and Signal have both said they’d leave the UK market before allowing CSS. Not even Google would be down for that.

Years of them pushing for this without success is an indicator that it won’t happen, not that it will. We have to keep in mind that the limitations and fallout that have kept this from happening so far continue to exist. The UK would become a tech pariah, which is actively doesn’t want.

True. That is probably what the UK will settle on too.

You need a TV licence because that’s the funding model for the BBC (and wider broadcasting infrastructure), not because the government want to keep tabs on who has a TV.