Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
The Peter Principle writ large.
I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job.
Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check.
Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check.
Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check.
That's where the UK is.
But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
bexit came before the trump election
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-)
In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded.
Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years.
The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished.
There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time.
That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.
