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Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

Every tragedy will be used to further the cause of totalitarianism. The contents of this article, and every identical piece that is written after every new disaster, is less worthy of HN discussion than this broader issue. Encryption is the primary facilitator of privacy in our current times, and privacy is a fundamental human right. Law enforcement doesn't understand this, they only know "getting the baddies". And in times where violence is at an all time low despite recent tragedies, "getting the baddies" is decreasingly important relative to the preservation of rights.

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> privacy is a fundamental human right. Law enforcement doesn't understand this, they only know "getting the baddies"

Law enforcement doesn't have any issues with their understanding or their clarity of thinking, but frankly I think people like us on tech forums often do.

Remember: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The difference between "terrorist" and "dissident" is mostly nuanced definition, depending very much on whether the observer supports the people at question or doesn't. People trying to overthrow the Chinese government are 'dissidents' unless you're a member of the Chinese government, in which case they're terrorists. The fighters in eastern Ukraine are either pro-Russian rebels or anti-Ukrainian terrorists, again depending on who is talking. Islamic mullah's are either exercising their inalienable right to freedom of speech, or spreading extremism and brainwashing people ... probably depending on whether you grew up in the USA or the UK.

It's for these sorts of reasons that the UN has never been able to arrive at a working definition of terrorism.

So now look at the arguments deployed by the technical community for strong encryption. Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it's important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government. It is easy to find encryption products that make this sort of argument.

In short, the tech community argues that strong government-proof crypto is important because dissidents must be protected (who else is both sympathetic and needs the ability for their communication to have court-order-proof levels of privacy?). But those same governments hear these arguments and say, wait, the dissidents we're dealing with are not dissidents, they're terrorists!

So this is an unresolvable conflict of views. The tech industry will unfortunately always be in the position of explicitly supporting terrorism, from at least some observers point of view. It's inherent in the idea that sometimes governments must not be all powerful.

Good points.

> Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it's important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government.

Also, too much privacy can also support defection rather than coordination. The government may look at this and see something else: that in the arguably much more likely scenario criminals will use encryption to defect against the social order. Enough untraceable trade and then when there's a nuclear or biological attack you may think about reconsidering just how much privacy do you want general population to have.

I don't want to defend or support the surveillance state here, just pointing out that, especially from government's point of view, them turning totalitarian seems much less likely than criminals and terrorists doing their crime and terror things.

But it is worthy of discussion around the issue of privacy to raise awareness. Current and past events serve as an example for us discuss and show that privacy is a human right that should not be compromised.

I think everyone here is well aware of the issue. It's getting the message to people outside of the tech bubble that's missing.

I have "after Snowden" begin to doubt that. Sure, there is a lot of people who say they support privacy. But then a lot of the industry nowadays is based on shuffling peoples data around. So I wonder how "deep" peoples convictions are or if it's just more out of convenience to avoid responsibility for their own activities?

Rarely is someone in technology upset over, say, the lack of use of encryption when sending e-mails. While when you talk to say lawyers or journalists, for which privacy is the basis of their activities, they are often quite upset over the tech industries cavalier attitudes.

More than anything I think you can't effectively defend something if you don't know the issues or peoples concerns. It's great that there is a lingering support of privacy from hackers subculture, but if you can't oppose someone saying "but terrorism" it might not be worth very much. It might actually be more damaging, because you don't see how you could be the "bad" guy (in terms of privacy).

I am so mad at what the "security" apparatus is trying to do right now -- they are trying to cover up the fact that they employ arrogant idiots that rely too much on technology and don't cooperate with other european counterparts.

Their alternative to real police/intelligence work is indiscriminate surveillance 1984 style.

If there was no strong, public key encryption, the bad guys would still find ways to coordinate without it, it's been done since times immemorial.

Well, on the bright side, the more they talk about how unbreakable encryption the encryption is, the more likely some no good idiot will have a false sense of security and think that their phone is the logical device to communicate about their plans for one evil plot or another...

There may come a time soon where the violence is widespread enough to actually justify this level of invasion of privacy. The threat of these sorts of attacks is increasing and if countries like Pakistan are any clue, it's simply not possible to ignore it and say everything will be fine because only a small portion of the population is involved. That small portion can wreak havoc and must be managed and surveillance is the right tool to do just that. It's by far better than any other method of dealing with the problem... and it does allow for surgical precision as long as the authorities don't use it instead to go after other crime, which they inadvertently do.

> The threat of these sorts of attacks is increasing

Any data to back that up? 9/11 was by far the worst and that was 14 years ago. Seems to me Islamic terrorism is hanging pretty steady at a 'virtually non-existent' level.

Depends on which countries you are talking about, if you are talking about Western countries ... then yes... If you are talking about Muslim countries then no...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_%28non-state%29_terror...

Well, but if the East has problems with terrorist attacks, then there's exactly zero reason why the West should be giving up their liberties because of that.

You're so afraid. I genuinely pity you. I don't mean that as a personal attack, I'm just saying I can't imagine living life with that much anxiety. I think you should watch less mainstream news.

Personally, I'd rather die free than live surveilled. You can call me young and naive and say my principles just haven't had time to be challenged. I don't care. I stand by this completely and don't apologize for it. Freedom is the basis for a meaningful life.

It has almost never been a safer time to live in Europe than it is now. Look at crime rates, they are dropping everywhere. Homicide is down, robberies are down. Terrorist attacks happen so rarely that they almost don't count. The number of people killed in traffic accidents in the USA on the same day of the Paris attacks is almost the same as the number of people killed by terrorists. I'm sorry to be so cold, but they didn't even manage to make a dent in the stats graph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Unio...

And if I was Spock I might care about that kind of argument. As it happens, people care far more about the feeling of safety than safety and believe me that feeling tanked after Paris.

There are other ways of addressing feelings of safety that don't involve giving up liberties.

The issue isn't whether the invasive surveillance is acceptable or not.

The issue is that it won't work. If you introduce mandatory backdoors into any commercial messaging system, it will not be used; the Bad Guys(tm) will simply return to using open source crypto, like pgp-over-whatever that we've had for decades.

I.e. if strong crypto is outlawed, then only outlaws will have strong crypto.

The intelligence agencies know this. Anyone pushing for backdoors in the name of counter-terrorism is either a fool or a liar.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal...

Here, read and understand.

Maybe we could start with low hanging fruit like Bush and Blair going to jail? Let's talk about "catching" people once we started not being complete hypocrites. Many of the major crimes in the world are well documented, and the perpetrators are known.

Besides, mass surveillance in itself is an attack on human rights, and as such not terribly useful for defending human rights. Maybe if it could avert millions of murders each year, we could talk about it. But with it averting nearly nothing, it's like cutting off your arm because you have an ink stain on your finger.

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