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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

> Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse. The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement.

While political engagement is an alternative to "slapping unbreakable crypto" onto things, this article establishes no precedent for political engagement actually helping!

I see the technical as political, direct action as engagement.

An article like this that's attempting to be a call to action, needs to provide some positive reinforcement. I find myself failing to come up with big wins, the examples I can think of are almost exclusively heartbreakingly tragic (snowden, manning, swartz, Occupy, etc). When I think of political engagement in the US, I think of pretty violent end cases for everyone involved.

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SOPA's defeat was a big win.

There is almost no political engagement from the technology sector, as compared to others (like pharmaceuticals, finance, telecoms, entertainment). If there had, the DMCA might not be so onerous, the CFAA would be gone, and SOPA would never have gotten as far as it did.

SOPA is probably the biggest recent achievement from activism (unless you want to count Wheeler and the Title II decision).

But tellingly, activism has failed to solidify a victory there. It was COICA, then SOPA, then PIPA, then ACTA, and now TPP, all pushing a bunch of the same core changes. Whenever there's resistance, the thing goes into hiding and comes back wearing new clothes. Lately, it's been handled in settings where debate happens behind closed doors and domestic activism has little power.

And yes, that might look different if major corporate players were more involved. But their stances are varied and inconsistent at best, and to the extent that this is for the benefit of private citizens the political approach appears to be an endless defensive fight.

I wonder. I've seen people on HN saying that Google is one of the biggest lobbyist, so apparently tech sector is very much present in Washington. So maybe it's not that there is no engagement, but that those who engage have different goals in mind than your average HNer?

Google (Alphabet) has been spending way more than previously, but the "Internet" industry as a whole doesn't even reach the top 20: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&inde...

Perhaps even inherently opposite goals. Google, Facebook, et al make it their business to peel away your privacy and know everything about you.

>There is almost no political engagement from the technology sector, as compared to others

That's because the tech sector is busy actually doing useful stuff and inventing world-changing technologies. Pharma only does some of that (their pace of innovation is quite lackluster, and they spend more on marketing than on R&D, the real medical innovation is being done by other entities), finance is figuring out how to make money from a bad economy with hedge funds, telecoms are just exploiting their monopolies and screwing customers over, and entertainment is just rehashing old stuff with never-ending low-quality remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels.

Instead of trying to use politics to make more money by screwing people over (which is how other industries mostly work), the tech sector makes money by creating new technologies. It's a fundamentally different mindset.

No, that is not why.

The reason why the tech sector does not engage in politics, is that people feel they are above politics and "don't want to get dirty".

Further more, they're sure the laws doesn't matter on the Internet anyway, right ?

John Perry Barlow has a hell of a lot to answer for.

Direct action is a pretty terrible form of engagement.

There's a real process and it should be used. People are starting to realise this with the Sanders campaign, although they've still gone about it pretty badly. Engagement has to be institutional and ongoing. The EFF/ACLU approach is pretty good.

If the 4th amendment lobby was anywhere near as good as the 2nd amendment lobby, you would be in a far better place.

Edit: seriously, learn from the gun lobby: they've dealt with both the "terrorism" and "think of the children" arguments while being popular anti-government patriots.

The main thing they have is a very large, very profitable industry whose income rises and falls with minor changes in legislation. If the fourth amendment were the freedom to eat sugar, I guarantee that their advocacy would be just as effective.

Direct action is the only effective form of engagement other than direct payments.

I'm actually curious: can anyone cite a serious win for privacy that was wholly political?

I frequently see pieces criticizing over-reliance on crypto as solutionism and political apathy, but I don't understand what they expect. The people fighting for strong cryptography have also led the political fight for privacy, but their nontechnical efforts have been ignored or circumvented at every turn. At this point it's hard to imagine what a strong, trustworthy political advance would even look like.

Well, there was a declassification of cryptography as munitions, which was very important. But that kind of proves the point, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does.

I almost called out the crypto wars specifically, because they were a political win caused by technical means (just too hard to control exports) and enabling technical progress (didn't regulate surveillance, but made privacy securable).

To the extent that anyone has actually come to the table on this stuff, it's been as a result of technical change forcing their hand. I wouldn't be surprised if widespread encryption-by-default changes the terms of the debate and opens the door to more transparency from governments who want some degree of cooperation.

"there was a declassification of cryptography as munitions"

That's the popular tale. It was partial. Lots of stuff, including high-assurance systems and custom, stayed under old classification. Such export uncertainty was a consideration in the cancellation of A1-class, VAX, Security Kernel. Here's excerpts and links from a write-up I did on it after I dug into the actual export laws:

http://pastebin.com/GHmHJASm

Still like some help from professionals to confirm or reject my analysis. People dealing with export on Schneier's blog gave feedback indicating they never ran into trouble. Yet, they might have been under the mass-market classification. So, I don't know if the other one is enforced or under what circumstances.

How far back are you willing to look? "The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) was a bill passed by the United States Congress in 1988 ... to prevent what it refers to as "wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records..." Congress passed the VPPA after Robert Bork's video rental history was published during his Supreme Court nomination." [1]

I thought there were also some U.S. privacy laws around library records, but can't locate a clear reference just now.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The rental records of several specific adult video places in the DC area were probably foremost in the minds of that bill's sponsors. Going forward, they realized they would need to be more circumspect, and internet allowed them to pretend that they were. (Of course, they can't hide their peccadilloes from the state intelligence apparatus but most of them are wholly owned by that entity for other, actually-evil reasons anyway.) Kathleen Kane in Pennsylvania has claimed that her current troubles stem from a similar motivation on the part of her disgruntled employees.

Interesting, thanks. 1988 is a while back, but it's far more relevant than the people citing the Fourth Amendment!

That's actually a pretty solid win for privacy, although it doesn't alleviate my sense that the government stance is "we can read everything as long as we don't tell anyone about it". The last I heard about library records was the Patriot Act opening them to government investigation, but things may have changed since them.

Still, this one is news to me, I appreciate it.

I'm pretty sure that both former slaves, women and most recently nonheteronormative lovers would disagree that there is "no precedent for political engagement actually helping".

That is the only way human rights have ever been won, and privacy in electronic communication is very much a human right.

(Yes, I'm the author of that piece)

I do IT for a think tank in DC. I've seen people across the political spectrum fail to enact their particular agenda for their entire multi-decade careers. Changing policy is slow and, quite often, impossible.

If only there was some way of contiuing policy through some other means...

That's the importance of technology (and arms).

Arms are now, and have been since the days before the ass' jawbone, just a kind of technology. I think increasingly the value lies in technology which doesn't have killing someone as its primary function. That's true for you and me, and it's true for a government that seems perpetually fascinated with "Less Lethal" options.

Electroshock devices have shown the world just how much people will take from their government, if it has almost no chance of killing or visibly scarring them.

If one can enjoy a multi-decade career without making any changes, why worry about making changes?

Because most political jobs pay abysmally, have little job security, and require painful working hours. As such, there aren't many reasons to go into politics beyond wanting to make a change.

>no precedent for political engagement actually helping!

Off the top of my head:

In the US: the fourth amendment, Miranda rights, the right to abortion, various efforts to decrim gay sex.

Here in Canada, Trudeau père famously said "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation", adding that "what's done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act,_19...

Presumably "no precedent" means "relating to privacy and security". To the extent that there are legal wins there, they were either extracted by technical means (e.g. the crypto wars) or effectively meaningless (e.g. 'oversight' of bulk surveillance).

I think the point is that privacy and security are physical as well as digital and if political engagement made one prevail, why not the other? We have more privacy protections now than we did 100 years ago due to political engagement, there is not reason to believe we cannot continue that effort into the digital realms.

It's a claim worth discussing, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced by it.

There's absolutely reason to believe that the effort can't be smoothly continued into digital realms. First, because interpretations of how existing progress applies to digital issues has consistently minimized privacy and maximized institutional power. Second, because it's not clear that government oversight or legal protections are actually working when they are obtained. We have a long tradition of using activism to produce legislative wins, but on digital issues we constantly see those wins being ignored or circumvented (e.g. illegitimate takedown requests and unapproved domestic surveillance).

I don't think giving up the political fight is a good idea, but it's always jarring when I see people say "crypto nuts should turn to politics instead!" The people pushing strong crypto have historically also been the ones seeking political progress with minimal results.

I do not follow.

The fourth amendment establishes that "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"

Roe v Wade literally invented the legal right to privacy in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Right_to_privacy

The Fourth and Roe are relevant, although I would argue that gay marriage and Miranda are essentially unrelated. In the US, "no government in the bedroom" privacy and non-self-incrimination don't really carry over into "don't read my mail" style privacy. They might bound prosecution, but not surveillance.

More broadly, what I meant was that digital privacy, security, and ownership have been a consistently losing battle. The interpretation of how legal protections (the Fourth included) apply to computers has skewed towards state power in virtually every case, and victories on digital issues are almost all a result of technological activism rather than pure political work.

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