This is a terrible headline, despite being the original.

The "watchdog" is a KC (senior barrister) officially appointed to review the legislation. He's warning that this could be considered hostile activity under the act, which would be a bad thing. In other words, he's criticising the act for being overly broad, a view that most on HN agree with, and his criticisms of it presumably carry some weight, given his official role.

As usual, this has provoked a load of ill-informed knee-jerk rants about the UK government from people who didn't read past the headline. This act is an absolute stinker, but let's maybe criticise what's actually happening rather than some imagined cartoon variant of it.

Yes! The headline here is almost reversing the sense of what is being reported.

This is the independent reviewer doing his job and pointing out how the legislation under review could have consequences we might not like.

It's not a government spokesperson supporting or endorsing those consequences.

Once again, the transparency we do have in the UK is weaponised against it.

You see this with "OMG knife-crime is out of control in London" type stories that the US love to run.

It's because we were :

  1. a decade or more ahead of the rest of the world in actually collecting knife-crime stats
  2. Include in those stats people who were simply carrying the kind of knife that wouldn't even get you noticed elsewhere, let alone recorded in the stats.

And that's even without considering that the weapon of choice in the USA is the firearm.

But you wouldn't beleive it from the headlines.

Back to this story, here we have legislators doing their job of scrutinising, and their open scrutiny is held up against the country.

We could instead have a system where people vote on bills without knowing their contents like the US does.

What an Orwellian name, 'watchdog', for an organization that undermines privacy. They're watching, all right.

edit: I misunderstood the poorly-worded headline. It should have been something like "Creating apps like Signal could be 'hostile activity' according to govt., claims UK watchdog".

Seems very coordinated, like whenever there’s an article on the Trump administration crushing free speech by cutting funding/sanctioning/suing anyone critical of it, it quickly gets flagged into oblivion, but anything the UK and others do gets spun out of proportion and hangs around on the front page for ages.