Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

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> And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no.

Disagree. The person imagines a constrained government, which would only be reading private messages when there is reason for suspicion. The only time another human would be invading their privacy is in an exceptional situation that happens to others (since they themselves are good), which can be just-worlded to the required degree. And of course mass media distorts their priors to think that suspicion strongly implies guilt - a TV show would be quite boring if there were no wrongdoing.

I suspect tech is so (relatively) resistant to mass surveillance because we've perceived how horribly wrong group dynamics go and, rather than accepting being compliant herd followers, found our own outlets and created our own kingdoms. We are the outliers - we will never have the majority on our side.

> The person imagines a constrained government, which would only read private messages when there is reason for suspicion.

That's the point. People who support mass surveillance or encryption bans only do so because they're uninformed (or have been purposely misinformed by others). You teach regular people how it actually works and they change their tune.

Except the chance of a human seeing those messages is still constrained. I don't think your 'average' person is creeped out by a computer analyzing their messages. To the extent some might be, they have so little digital autonomy (gmail etc) that the only way they can change that is to avoid electronic communication for the things they'd like to keep private. And the majority are clearly not doing that for the bulk of their communication.

My parents are okay with mass surveillance. I've tried running them through how it actually works, but it turned out that they really don't seem to care about this kind of privacy. They are very much about the idea that "if it even saves just one person" it's worth it.

On the subject of encryption bans and backdoors, I explained that this would make it easier for them to be the target of hacks and fraud. This concerned them, but ultimately they are under the impression that the people handling it know more than me and I can't be correct.

I don't think they are particularly out-of-the-ordinary, so I don't think the solution is a simple act of informing people. I think people who do care about this stuff largely need to accept the possibility that this isn't important to the majority of the population, and that it never will be (no matter how informed the public is). Instead, we need to continue build the tools and the infrastructure to secure ourselves regardless of policy and legislation.

>even if it saves one person its worth it did you explain that encryption saves people too?

The problem with the encryption conversation, is that they believe people more knowledgeable than myself are dealing with it. I demonstrated its importance, and they see how necessary it is.

But when I say the kinds of changes being proposed would fundamentally undermine the security encryption provides, they think I'm wrong. Like most of the current presidential-hopefuls, they believe in a magic-bullet that will give the government access but no one else. They think someone smarter than me will implement it, and that my concerns are misplaced.

Again, I don't see this as a strange viewpoint. I think, to some degree, it's what most people believe.

Your parents sound like Hillary, Cruz, Bush, or Rubio voters.

People in tech are suspicious of mass surveillance because most people in tech got here by way of Science Fiction, which was in a dystopian phase when we were highly impressionable.

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