Comment by jacobrobbins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobrobbins | Hacker News Reader

This is the correct path forward to move society into a digital era. It follows the well established principle that the state uses force in legally proscribed ways to maintain security. Known as the “monopoly of the legitimate use of force”, this is a core concept of modern law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence). This concept carries over cleanly from the past into the digital era. In this case govt security forces are committing digital violence in the same way that criminals do. Same thing as when the SWAT team breaks down a door, just a digital version.

The alternative is that the government co-opts manufacturers so that government agencies can carry out security tasks without using digital violence. That’s what the FBI is seeking in the Apple case and it is a much worse direction for society because it challenges the existence of strong security in our increasingly digital society.

Note that the legitimate use of force is done according to law. As stated in the article, “In order to use the malware, government officials will have to get a court order, allowing authorities to hack into a citizen's system.”. If your objection to this is “they say that it’s done according to law but we know there will also be instances of them using it inappropriately” then you are also arguing that strong encryption (and pretty much any interesting technology) should not be allowed for public use because we know there will also be instances of it being used to achieve bad ends.

I understand that the reality of police, military, etc are not as nice as the theory but I have not seen people here explicitly rejecting the use of force by the state. If you oppose the German government employing spyware, you should consider whether you also oppose it arresting people in general. I suspect most people here have no alternative to suggest in place of the centuries of legal tradition that western societies are built on.

Use of force requires transparency and regulation to avoid corruption. That's why we have things like a separate judiciary, warrants, publicly available court documents, freedom of information requests, and so on and so forth. The use of force is also minimized wherever possible; warrants restrict the scope, both for arrests and searches, and are filtered through the aforementioned public and separate judicial system. Then we have things like the Posse Comitatus Act and use-of-force guidelines encouraging or mandating diplomatic and less-lethal attempts when possible and limiting force to dedicated peacekeepers.

Governments have been using their digital force violently, indiscriminately, and secretly. None of those are acceptable even on their own and all three together is outrageous.

This is an interesting thought to consider. I'd note that there are people who aren't very happy about the present state of SWAT team usage, prosecuting folks in such a way to require plea deals, and other excesses in the state's exercising of it's powers.

On a specific line:

> If your objection to this is [...] you are also arguing that strong encryption [...] should not be allowed for public use

This is a false equivalence: asking for restrictions on the state is not equivalent to asking for restrictions on the public.

Also in general, there is no requirement to make "digital violence" the same as "physical violence". The state's use of violence is restricted by law, I don't see a reason the forbidding of "digital violence" would fall outside the legal framework already established.

One thing that's important to consider here is what happens if a corrupt government sabotages the democratic process. The US deals with that scenario via the second amendment, Germany relies on non-violent means like protests and civil disobidience (which can be very effective tools as demonstrated by the reuinition of Germany).

The problem with both approaches is that it requires organisation among citizens, which in turn requires a way to communicate with minimal danger of the secret police showing up immedietly afterwards. In the past this was ensured because surveilance was extremely hard to scale to an entire country. In recent years mass surveilance has become a reality, is increasingly hard to escape, and requires fewer and fewer human beings.

Of course right now the system is limited by judical oversight, and that's great. But over the course of decades the seperation of powers is bound to fail occasionally. We need more protection from the government than that.

>If you oppose the German government employing spyware, you should consider whether you also oppose it arresting people in general

Obviously we still need law enforcement, but police existed before the wiretap and can exist in a post-wiretap world.

> Same thing as when the SWAT team breaks down a door, just a digital version.

Not quite the same thing, because the SWAT team is not stealthy when it breaks down a door.

The stealth aspect is what bothers me about this: it's much harder to make ensure a stealthy operation sticks to all the rules than a public one.

In fact, the recent years in Germany have shown that the Parliament doesn't have firm control over what the various secret services do.

If the monopoly on violence applies to information technology as well as physics technology, then the second amendment and similar doctrines also apply. The whole Apple case could also be interpreted as the US government attempting to get around that by taxing, legislating, and undercutting the ammunition manufacturing industry out of existence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com