"This would be the worst response to the attacks in Golders Green and would just produce more division when it's the job of responsible leaders to bring people together", he added. [leader of our green party]

Jeremy Corbyn's Your Party also warned the response to the "abhorrent" attacks should not restrict civil liberties.

However, the Conservatives and Reform UK have called for the government to take a tougher approach to the demonstrations."

This part reads a bit like the old cartoon consciences fighting it out. I reckon the red guy with a pitchfork is winning.

he thinks they are the good ones, so hes okay with it.

now he can make a name for himself by stamping out CIVIL RIGHTS.

If you can stop protests, why didn't they stop the right-wing protesters smashing up our city centre and burning out local businesses?

Didn't this doofus originally make a name for himself as a civil rights lawyer?

I installed a VPN on my child and it did no harm at all, except she sometimes now speaks flemish.

I remember a while ago I heard someone who was probably a middle aged woman and a social activist on the Today Programme saying that they should implement scanning on e2ee services for csam. The host rightfully pointed out something to the tune of "well that would mean breaking the encryption, right?" And she responded with "well, these people are smart, they will figure something out".

Avada kacsam

Why not just mandate magic?

Well I'm certainly against forced face reveal so facial recognition cameras can work. I think privacy is something we need to reclaim.

By the same token you we should be campaigning for everybody being fully anonymous and wearing a mask at all times.

Feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Also: the fact that you bought a metro tickets contains zero actionable information for any "agency". Great, you have a ticket. When will you use it, though?

Yes it does. It links my identity to the locations...

• I bought it
• I entered the metro system
• I exited the metro system

My travel through the city is now in a database. It's the sort of thing that a authoritarian state would find very useful to track down dissidents.

I'm not saying that Spain's current government would use it in this way, but they've constructed a system that would be very useful to a future bad actor. It's naive to think governments will always be benign and never abuse such systems.

Probably due to taxing laws. Citizens get a discount, tourists don't. Or you get a discount dependant on your age, etc.

Also: the fact that you bought a metro tickets contains zero actionable information for any "agency". Great, you have a ticket. When will you use it, though?

And, again, the entirety of Central Europe has mandatory IDs for decades. Just look at how incompetent the police over there is to see how little it does for "spying" or "controlling the population".

Bah! Poland's communist government imposed upon them by the USSR made the IDs mandatory and they still got toppled by the student and worker underground. Where was this "control" then?

Like Spain then, where you can't buy a metro ticket without ID

common case for ID use is when you lost your keys and need to break into your own home

I agree.

That being said... Internet has changed. What used to be a private, personal space for a bunch of nerds, became yet another aspect of "real life".

Banks live here, streaming services, whole companies exist solely online, most of the world's finances is done online, etc., etc.

Unless you pull a Bartmoss' DataKrash, you cannot go back from that.

And where the money is, crime is. I know I'll be downvoted for saying this, but it's just a fact of life: the Internet is being used to hurt a lot of people daily. And we have no means of preventing that.

Digital ID might be a step in the right direction - it would certainly curb the impact that misinformation/rage campaigns using bot networks have.

I remember when the US imposed Internet sanctions on russia, effectively cutting it off from its services (for all of two days before they found ways around it), and the entire r/Conservative became a ghost town. Something like four posts were published in the span of those two days, one of them asking if the whole subreddit is really just bots from russia.

If every user was verified, this wouldn't be a thing.

And yes, I understand the dangers of letting a government control/see what I'm browsing online. And yes, I understand that the current UK administration is nowhere near capable of designing a system that's even on the same plane of existence as the solution to the underlying issue.

But I also understand that if we don't do anything at all, we'll end up in the same state as the US - broken and divided, with russia reaping the rewards.

Do you believe that age verification online is to protect children? Likewise for mandatory backdoors to secured data and encryption bans?

Digital id can be abused and controlled in ways a physical id cannot. There are some similarities to the idea of having a 'cashless society' but it also has unique problems.

Because a digital id is likely to become much more convenient, it's not a stretch that it becomes mandatory to verify for services that previously had no need to. You have another reply talking about museums and buses, which you think is ridiculous, but when it becomes so simple to do these things can creep in.

We don't know the implementation being planned, so it is hard to say for sure - but I don't want it and believe it should be resisted as strongly as possible.

There's a massive gap between "mandatory ID" and "like China", mate.

Most of central Europe has mandatory IDs. Nobody gives a fuck because nobody who checks them has the time to report anything anywhere, even if anybody required anything like that. It's literally only used to check the age of a person 99% of the time.

And nobody checks them when you want to enter a museum.

When it's used to check into museums and use trains and online services just like China

"Tracking"? How do you use an ID for tracking?

I mean, sure, digital ID would allow that in some way (although that's already fully possible with other means), but a physical ID?

Yes. The government has no business forcing us to use their mandatory ID for tracking us.

Yeah, I get that, but is just the case of "we're against it because it's mandatory"? Like, you're not against the concept of an ID, just the fact that it's mandatory?

Why is that? What's malicious about it?

The point is that it's mandatory. There is currently no mandatory ID in the UK

Oh, wow! As someone who was born and raised in a country that had IDs for just shy of 100 years - what's the logic behind that?

We are also against mandatory physical ID.