Peter Kyle is the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. He is also an imbecile, a cretin, and a buffoon. I honestly don’t understand how these intellectually challenged people get into positions of power and influence and then are gifted portfolios well above their intellectual abilities. If this evaluation seems harsh, consider his latest pronouncement:
“If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.”
If he genuinely believes that, then add insanity to the charge of intellectual feebleness.
Let us overlook for now that the extremely problematic issue of the act being used from Day One as a blunt instrument of political censorship. No, let’s review the likely consequences. I say “review” because I have already written about this, as no doubt have many others. Back in 2019 when the former Tory government was toying with these silly ideas, I wrote that the entire notion was “ill-thought out and will fail”. I have no reason to revise that estimation, but I will rehash it, with some predictions.
(1) This is a scammer’s dream: There have already been ‘Captcha’ scams. Almost everyone has been confronted with those Captcha puzzles to “prove that you’re a human”. Scammers have set up fake ones to trap gullible people into inadvertently installing malware and giving away logins and passwords and other personal information. The new “age verification” apps will be no different. They will require credit card numbers, utility bills, banking information, and other means of confirming age. There will soon be as many fake ones and spoofed ones as legitimate ones. They will look and feel exactly the same, only the information you enter will go to the Russian mob or a Chinese cartel. People seeking to avoid using these schemes for this very reason may seek out “cracks” to circumvent them and will – ironically – expose themselves to even greater online dangers.
(2) This is a hacker’s wet dream: There is apparently no such thing as data security. As I pointed out in my 2019 article, “almost all big databases are eventually hacked. Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, LinkedIn – even the NHS – have all been hacked and users’ details released into the wild. Anything requiring a large amount of user-data to be stored is a target for hackers.” Since then we have seen three more state institutions compromised: the MoD was hacked, and the NHS (again!), and the Electoral Commission, and the British Library. In addition commercial institutions with large databases are swatting hackers away, not always successfully. EasyJet, and 23andMe, were notable recent breaches. In addition, supermarket chains The Coop, and M&S both had their customer databases hacked, exposing personal data of millions of customers.
If it wasn’t bad enough that the MoD had its payroll hacked in 2022, exposing the banking details of over a quarter of a million personnel, we recently learned that a data breach involving cooperative Afghans cost the taxpayer billions to deal with.
That the government has the hubris to force the pubic to submit to another giant database only weeks after this disaster speaks volumes. They’re idiots.
(3) VPN use will make all this pointless anyway: VPNs are now built into popular browsers and off-the-shelf cyber-security products like Norton and McAfee. You can hardly watch a YouTube video these days that isn’t sponsored by Nord VPN or Surfshark. I quipped in 2019, “It should be obvious that unless they have it in mind to ban VPNs in the UK, the measure will have no teeth.” Of course, yesterday we learned that this is precisely what this idiot government is thinking of doing!
Of course, banning VPNs – which provide legitimate front-line defence against cyber attacks, data interception, and corporate espionage, would be a huge boost to hackers (see Point 2). We can breathe a temporary sigh of relief that “the government has no intention of doing this” as this usually means they won’t do it this month. Next month? All bets are off.
(4) We don’t know the social effects of blocking porn (and speech): No, we don’t. Porn has been around since the dawn of time. It has been found in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. For all we know, the Venus of Willendorf may have been helping men (and lesbians) get their jollies 30,000 years ago! Where will all this sexual energy go when it is denied a mostly benign outlet? I have no idea, but neither does the government. What I do know – and they apparently do not – is that, like Love, Porn will always find a way.
However, it is entirely possible that ‘Porn’ is is just the moralistic smokescreen and that ‘Speech’ has been the primary target all along. The chilling effect on a nation increasingly ill at ease and feeling it is unable to speak its collective mind will certainly have a social effect. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Keir Starmer announced his new elite Cyber-Police division the same week this Act came into force. This is going to end badly. Just ask the East Germans.
(5) The government will make a hash of it: There is a huge competence gap in government and has been for decades. Labour or Tory, they are going to cock it up. They cock everything up because absolutely everything is badly thought through and even worse in implementation. Already internet giants like Wikipedia are complaining that the categorisation of website and implementation of the rules is muddled and confusing. If you thought the (completely pointless) “cookie warning” regulation caused annoyances, just wait!
Well, they didn’t listen to reason back in 2019 and they are not going to listen to reason today, so this will plough ahead regardless. Let’s reconvene on this topic in a year or two and see how it is going. I have a fairly high confidence that I’ll score 5/5.
