Paraphrased proposals by UK prime minister

[dex1]

 * All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright


Source http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-propos.html

[runpaint]

IT BEGINS

[pedrog]

This is uber-ridiculous.

I know politicians tend to be technology ignorant, but this stuff is beyond stupid.

[Lethn]

"We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us."

Open Source will take care of that problem quickly.

[elvizzzzzzz]

Is it not clear that his job depends on his not understanding, well pretty much everything?

[dex1]

Is it not clear that his job depends on his not understanding, well pretty much everything?

Not understanding pretty much everything seems like not a big requirement to get the job.

[Maestro1]

David Cameron says many crazy things...

[Agestorzrxx]

Does the UK government even care about not fitting 1984's Big Brother stereotype anymore?

[reyhiesa]

Is it not clear that his job depends on his not understanding, well pretty much everything?

I disagree. They may use ignorance as a cover at times, but I think the truth is they don't care about the medium or long term effects. If it's politically convenient, or if they're getting paid/financed to do it, that's probably all that matters to them.