Comment by jccc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jccc | Hacker News Reader

Before you comment, please consider whether you'd prefer to vent your frustration in online message boards with like-minded people, or spend that potential energy in other ways:

"What you can do about it:

-- You can contact the Obama White House online to comment on strong encryption.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/webform/share-your-thoughts-onstr...

-- You can contact your state Senators and Representatives via the contact information supplied by ContactingTheCongress.org.

http://www.contactingthecongress.org/

-- You can specifically contact Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to express concerns about their bill intended to force companies to weaken or work around encryption under court orders.

http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi?sit...

http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi?sit...

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/09/proposed-senate-bi...

Express yourself with the honesty and clarity that the government's charm offensive is lacking."

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/14/take-a-stand-again...

A few more resources along the same lines:

* Tracking Congressional bills, Congressional representatives and voting history:

https://www.govtrack.us/

* General resource on local, state and federal elections:

https://ballotpedia.org

* Data on lobbying and political contributions:

https://www.opensecrets.org/

* Voting history, policy positions and public statement transcripts of politicians and political organizations:

http://votesmart.org/

"Strong encryption is a cornerstone of freedom of the press, privacy, health care, banking, and commerce to name a few only a few of our national interests. Any erosion to this bedrock of modern society harms us all. Once back doors exist they cannot be kept secret. To quote a common adage, "security by obscurity is not security". Similarly, outlawing strong crypto technology only keeps it out of the hands of law abiding American citizens and companies. Since encryption is based on mathematical concepts that once understood can be somewhat trivially implemented in code, it is impossible to put back in pandora's box. The US government cannot stop foreign nationals from writing crypto software or publishing math papers. Harming cryptography in the name of security would simply serve undermine our own economic and civil interests, while doing nothing to stop "terror.""

And what about the rest of the world? Can we do anything other than just trusting the US citizens to get their government to do the right thing?

Make your own country less corrupt, more free, and better for the economically-worst-off, so that your own entrepreneurs may eventually overtake the authoritarian superpowers?

>and better for the economically-worst-off,

Not that I disagree with this, but how is this supposed to help entrepreneurs? If anything, it will just increase the tax burden of running a business.

Or lower the barrier to entry to the marketplace for economically disadvantaged people with their own ideas and talents....

decreases the risk of failure and makes it less important who your parents were.

If you do stuff like building infrastructure, creating efficient health care systems (because you can do stuff for all the people lowering the price and having a bigger positive effect on overall health) you actually make it better for startups, cause they can use the infrastructure, need to pay lower wages (because health care and infrastructure are cheaper/taken care of).

If you use tax money on education you also have a positive effect for both startups and poor people.

You also even out the divide between new and and established companies, established companies having non innovative advantages, such as brand names, maybe their own "infrastructure". So you even get rid of companies that try to keep status quo and have innovation stall.

The sad thing is that currently some governments/parties/politicians create inhuman, even counter productive productive competition between humans while at the same time have companies be cartels and monopolies and more importantly create counter productive anti-competition laws such as intellectual property, to a degree really awful patent systems, brand protection stuff, etc.

It's kind of destructive in regards of innovation and progress.

All good points. Thanks for the well-reasoned response.

paying for a stable and educated society increases the size of the talent pool you can draw from.

You're not going to be a very successful entrepreneur if your customers are broke.

You can't create wealth out of thin air. The government can't make people un-broke without someone else paying for it. Either you're losing money to taxes or some of your customer base is losing to taxes. Either way, no benefit (unless your company targets the poor in particular).

You can create wealth out of thin air. The economy is not a zero sum game.

Ok, that's fair, there are several mechanisms (increased resource extraction, new tech, etc.) that can create wealth. However, taking money from one group and giving it to another does not create wealth. There is also an administrative overhead associated with such mechanisms, which could have been put towards more productive activities.

I'm wondering how myopia is going to help anything, including running a business.

EDIT:

I find it somewhat irritating that this needs to be stated, but helping the economically disadvantaged doesn't mean just raising taxes and giving everyone a welfare check. The narrative has been so well framed.

It could (and should IMO) mean creating a more just economic system while providing a real safety net. Ultimately, this would involve people being educated and able to obtain jobs that pay a decent wage.

There's some tax money involved in that, but I don't think we necessarily need to _raise_ taxes. Perhaps we just need to reallocate a bit from the war chest.

Your response was neither useful nor insightful.

>It could (and should IMO) mean creating a more just economic system

What exactly does this mean? Don't just give me platitudes about better education.

Make your own country independent of deep-state interlocking intelligence services. Part of the problem is that the US will set the tone for dozens of countries where it has cultivated linkages that often override the will of the people.

I'm looking at you, Sweden.

You can donate to the EFF or support open source encryption technology like Signal and GPG.

I feel like that White House petition is a honeypot.

This thread is a honeypot. Also buying any iPhone made after 2015.

are you being sarcastic? otherwise can you elaborate?

Found an easy way to call on iOS

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/voices-advocacy-tool/id96569...

Also signup for https://www.internetdefenseleague.org/

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