As a Brit this is one of the things I find so strange about US culture, there seems to be a real fear of government and authority. It seems (to me) that people in the US fear their government will do things that damage their freedom and rights through malicious intent.
I feel that here in he UK most people don't fear the government, they just think they are a bunch of useless muppets who have no idea what they are doing.
And yet you can be jailed for a mean tweet and can't own firearms more or less. You have barely avoided (for now) a backdoor being forcibly installed onto every chat and messaging service, though you may still see required snooping on semi public platforms.
It is the tyrants favor to be seen as useless and weak.
No you can't. It's far more complex than that, you have to be a very bad person (or very VERY stupid repeatedly ignoring warnings) for that to happen.
> can't own firearms
Good! We don't want people to have them. (Only somewhere between 1-4% want weaker firearms regulations)
> You have barely avoided (for now) a backdoor being forcibly installed onto every chat and messaging service
True, and it was quite right for the intelligence services to lobby for that, that's their job. But our democratic system worked and it was prevented by the multiple levels of government. They will try again, but I trust the system will prevent it.
> you may still see required snooping on semi public platforms
And I wouldn't be surprised if there is general support for this in the UK.
The US at least has provable history that it's intelligence organizations aren't completely incompetent and have already setup mass surveillance on it's citizens.
Perhaps the same should apply to vendors.