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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

To me, the big question is what a trustworthy political solution would look like.

I see this desire raised a lot, in contexts from HN to Valley-mocking pieces on how encryption is no substitute for advocacy. I completely understand the instinct, but every incarnation of it seems to struggle with the same question. Namely: how do you know when you've won?

Restrictions against collecting data on US citizens didn't produce the expected results. Testimony to Congress didn't accurately depict what's collected, even in secret. In the early days, the existence of these agencies was classified to help go around restrictions on existing agencies. Years ago, back in the Puzzle Palace days, the DoJ cited systematic criminality but concluded that they were unable to prosecute it.

So... what does winning look like? What regulation, what testimony, what promise could possibly convince people that a solution had been reached, even for the moment?

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You never win. To use a controversial example: Who thinks abortion rights people "won" with Roe v Wade? Their opponents have been relentlessly chipping away at that "victory" ever since. When you make something a political issue, you are guaranteeing that it cannot be won with any kind of finality.

After Roe, antiabortion strategies had to change. You can say that this was a weakness of Roe, but I think it's complex enough of a situation not to attribute it to a root cause. I prefer to think of this in terms of the Red Queen Syndrome[1]: solving problems reveals new ones.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

I agree, but I'm talking about a scale even shorter than that.

Roe v Wade was a clear and unambiguous advance for abortion rights, and the battle lines are now arrayed somewhere different than they were before Roe. The fight isn't over, but it's fairly clear who holds what.

I'm talking about even knowing when you've made progress. If a federal directive came through tomorrow expansively forbidding the NSA from collecting data on US citizens, privacy advocates wouldn't even hope that bulk surveillance of citizens would stop. They know better, because it basically happened, and the definitions of words got rearranged until the program could continue unabated.

Political issues aren't settled until they fade into consensus belief, but it's usually possible to make progress and then defend it. On surveillance and privacy, there's no law or court decision or whistleblower or even prosecution that can guarantee things aren't continuing exactly the way you didn't want them to.

On the current situation on the US, you'll know privacy advocates made progress when people start going to jail. No sooner.

I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where for example police departments compete for resources, basically to make their own department bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far as Ron Paul suggests, but....

The current libertarian candidates are pretty moderate compared to Ron Paul (or either major party for that matter) I recommend looking into them.

Exactly. This is why the fight to maintain gun rights is a never ending battle as well. Arming yourself with a gun is the best defense against a violent attacker. Legally enshrining that right is important. But even if we didn't have that right, we could still defend ourselves clandestinely via illegal means and home made weapons.

Similarly when it comes to security, privacy, and anonymity the best defense is to arm yourself with mathematical security.And to enshrine our right to those defenses in law. A subpoena only works if there is information that can be handed over in the first place. If strong and private encryption is made illegal then the best defense is still to use that technology clandestinely.

If someone made an argument that supports our right to strong encryption and doesn't also apply to gun rights I'd be impressed.

I feel safer when every private citizen I interact with uses strong encryption. I do not feel safer when every private citizen I interact with carries a gun.

I genuinely appreciate your response but it is not an argument.

fallacy [1]

>I feel x

isn't an argument. for example: I feel safer with a gun.

fallacy [2]

> ... when every private citizen I interact with carries a gun.

Having the right to carry a gun or the right to encryption does not imply everyone will/must carry one or use it at all times.

With encryption criminals around you can plan attacks, steal your identity, and trade child pornography without fear of the prying eyes of law enforcement ever being able to discover the evidence. That would probably make a large number of other people 'feel' unsafe as well. feeling a certain way isn't an argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Of course emotions are an argument. We're not Vulcans. Pretending that emotional impact is an irrelevant factor is a great way to win an argument without ever making anyone care what you said.

Thanks for the reply.

I 'feel' safer with the right to carry a gun. I can feel safer when everyone has a gun. Therefore morninj's argument does in fact also apply to guns.

Anyone can feel a certain way about anything, which is why it is invalid when trying to construct a logically sound objective argument.

A subjective premise can not lead us all to an objective conclusion.

But there are no objective conclusions in politics, and asking for such is shutting the door to any useful progress. Ideally, a good political solution is one where all involved parties "feel" that they have realized more of their demands than the others -- not one where one party gets all the spoils based on winning 51% of an artificial binary vote.

I feel (part of) the reason your society is in political gridlock is because everyone keeps looking for that mythical "objective" proof that ensures a 100% victory for their side. But that's just another unicorn.

The challenge I proposed is intended to be an objective exercise otherwise it's pointless because everyone can feel however they want.

Here are some examples of how both a gun and encryption can be used for the same end goal.

X can secure a financial transaction

X can stop a thief from obtaining my credit card information

X can stop someone from forcibly obtaining my identity

X can stop an attacker from obtaining private data stored in my home.

The only thing I've been able to think of that applies to encryption and does not apply to a gun is:

Encryption can verify that a message actually came from me by decrypting it using my public key.

This is objectively true for encryption and objectively false for a firearm. Also a firearm doesn't really help with anything on the internet except maybe a shady craigslist transaction in a dark parking lot. But I meant to imply that a realistic and suitable physical analogy can be applied.

Encryption means I can leave my private data unattended and be confident nobody will read it. That was easy.

Cool! Do you now better understand the rationale of gun rights advocates?

No, I understood it pretty well earlier thanks. It's nice if this exercise helped you though.

At least you learned something about making an objective argument.

nah, I'm still right where I started - arguments that ignore emotional impacts are great little learning exercises but pointless if you are trying to achieve something in the real world. Good luck out there.

To me, the goal isn't the only thing that matters. How you achieve that goal matters too, and "using a threat of violence" ranks pretty low on the ladder of civility. Trying to equate the arguments based on goal alone is starting your argument from a false equivalence.

The ends don't justify the means. Of course.

People will use force to take advantage of your moral stand against violence and make you comply to things you do not agree to.

We both abhor violence. The difference is I refuse to be victimized by it.

> Arming yourself with a gun is the best defense against a violent attacker.

Citation needed.

will these do?

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20150708/radical-anti-gun-gr...

http://www.naturalnews.com/047378_murder_sprees_armed_citize...

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/gwinnett-county/video-shows-...

"Best" might be hard to argue but it can be easily shown that you are better off having one when you need to defend yourself.

There have been countless times where courts have told three-letter agencies to stop doing things and they have stoppped. The judiciary has the power to protect us, much more than we give credit for.

There's still rule of law, and the executive mostly listens to what the judiciary tells it to do. For all its flaws, some of our institutions work pretty well compared to most places. I cannot think of another country where judges are able to overtake heads of states in substantial policy outcomes.

They have not stopped. And you can't prove otherwise. Which strikes at the heart of the matter.

Agencies all the way down

I'd actually be interested to see examples. Most of the ones I know are of courts and Congress ordering three letter agencies to stop doing things, and being lied to and ignored.

The infamous one: in its early days, the NSA was ordered to stop surveillance of US citizens. It went before the Church Committee and testified that the relevant sites had been closed for more than a year. This was a lie, bottom to top. The sites were actively operating as those words were spoken, and they weren't closed down until whistleblower James Bamford exposed the lie. https://theintercept.com/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/

There's a list a mile long of similar stories. Court decisions, executive orders, and acts of Congress have bounced off these agencies without result.

I'd like to see examples, but I agree that you're not wrong in general. The agencies do respond to court decisions sometimes. My point is that when legal compliance is a coin flip and there's no way to check for results, you can't be sure that legal decision has changed anything at all.

> Their opponents have been relentlessly chipping away at that "victory" ever since.

There, the "opponents" are a subset of society that have a legitimate right to not to agree with the decision and they are acting within the public framework of our governance to overturn a decision.

Here, the "opponents" of strict privacy rights are spooks and crooks in government and international corporations. It is entirely a differnet matter.

Established inherent rights -- specifically the rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and protection from unreasonable search and seizures -- need to be protected in context of new capabilities afforded by modern communication, surveillance, and data retention technologies.

Corporations will not pull a dissenting "Roe vs Wade" that would challenge citizen rights. Just let them try that.

Overreaching elements and sub-systems of the government can try and present cases where our (updated) rights present obstacles to their performances of their legitimate legally mandated activities. And there is ample precedence for oversight for such matters.

A technological cold war with government and industry on the technological field is not a realistic option. First of all, it is politically useless since that approach implies that the constitutional framework and our entire system is in effect broken. Second, the "mathematical" bit in the secure and private mediated communication systems is the only element where one could possibly argue for parity in terms of the contending parties' capabilities. Why pick a losing fight when there remains the constitutional field where we have the upper hand, by definition.

[edit: minor cleanup]

Enacting laws under the guise of trying to improve women's health with the effect of closing abortion clinics is only surface level "acting within the public framework of our governance". These laws are ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I claim the legislators and their supporters knew this before they enacted the laws. Unfortunately they also know that it will take the Supreme Court time to make this ruling. And in that time the state laws will act to close many abortion clinics. It doesn't seem very legitimate to me.

> When you make something a political issue, you are guaranteeing that it cannot be won with any kind of finality.

But you also set up the infrastructure to fight the good fight forever. Which is what it takes to make democracy work, and work well.

Because everything important is a political issue, whether you want it to be or not. The Superconducting Supercollider, which was as clear a piece of pure science as you could imagine, was killed by politics. End to end encryption could be too.

Honestly, a major reason we are in this mess now is that for decades Silicon Valley has avoided politics and tried to pretend that the federal government does not exist. Now that it can't be ignored anymore, the tech industry does not have any of the civic institutions needed to build broad public support for its issues.

I don't think that it's Silicon Valley avoided politics.. They literally used to work solely for the government.

Roe v. Wade was still a great start and major victory, relatively speaking. Change takes time.

It's a bit more complicated here, though, since so much of this activity is clandestine. We can't know what rules they may be breaking (unintentionally or otherwise).

>You never win.

What about human slavery?

> what does winning look like?

At this point, winning looks like the people responsible for abusing their power and overstepping their constitutional authority going to jail. And for a long time.

As long as the only consequence of illegal activity that violates the constitutional rights of citizens is being told to stop, there will be continued efforts to chip away and push the envelope for what they can get away with. If it were made apparent that there are personal consequences above and beyond the scope of their jobs, perhaps some of the people in those jobs would more carefully consider the constitutionality of their actions.

Genuine accountability. Rules that are enforced against the elites.

That would not happen with anything short of a revolution, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech.

You can no longer decouple strong cryptography from the global economy, that could be considered a strong political solution because it represents a loss of political control.

Essentially, there is no trustworthy political solution, because politics can always change. As long as the people say, “I've got nothing to hide”, surveillance fans and fear mongers will always find the necessary support.

I always ask, "what happens if it's suddenly illegal to be gay, drink, take selfies, or worse?" I don't think I've ever left a conversation where a person said that and they left not at minimum answering that question.

What's scary, is some people seem to want that stuff - as long as it's not them getting taken away and thrown in a cell.

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