Its an issue when you self censor opinions which deviate from the mass. It also an issue of freedom of press. The government know who you talk to through metadata collection even if you use encryption.
For this reason Signal is hardly comparable to Whatsapp and many other apps using the same protocol: the latter group openly logs metadata, the former says they almost don't, is open source, is more trustworthy due to the organizational structure. Finally, there's even some evidence ( https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand... ) that they don't.
At least parts of the server are open for a long time though[1], and they also recently exchanged some stuff into WebRTC. Could anybody clarify what part of it is still nonfree?
Not as much these days. Even SMTP uses opportunistic encryption between email servers. So it takes a number of emails to make a statistical inference based on timing if there is any amount of traffic.
Meanwhile, there are places that are living in a dystopia, and the single most important goal of the powers that be in those places is undermining the rule of law. So I can't help but be skeptical of stories like this.
We have a society where we can air discussions about topics like this, and where criminals can be kept out of the public sphere, and these are good things. There. And hey, tonight at least, for once, I won't go to a throwaway to say so.
What's the use of being able to freely discuss any story if the people who's job is to uncover sensitive stories are silenced?
We like to think our Western countries somehow are immune, but without any particular reason. In reality we should worry more due to our technology. If lack of free speech combines with the ability to monitor everyone's speech (through phones, TV, breaking ssl) we will have recreated 1984 quite well.
That seems unfair. I am sure there are many governments that would like to get their share of data too.
If anything, cases like this demonstrate how quickly that can change when you soften surveillance and free speech laws. Look at Turkey. Turning a democracy into a dictatorship took only a few years.
The German government, too, is working on establishing a massive censorship complex. How can you tell it's censorship? They don't bother going after the people who make supposedly illegal statements. Instead, they pressure social networks directly to make the statements disappear without any legal process.
Right now, many people are cheering, because it works in their favor, but they're too shortsighted to realize that it'll eventually be used against them, too.
Note that I'm not even saying that certain statements shouldn't be punishable, but in a democracy, there must be a legal process for each and every case. When opinions or money decide what should be censored, it stops being a democratic process.
Right now, they've appointed a private organization (Arvato) that belongs to the Bertelsmann group, which has a strong lobbying branch and is very close to the government.
So basically, a private corporation is allowed to run its own show on all ends and it'll only get worse when they turn this into a law.
German sources:
https://netzpolitik.org/2016/sz-recherche-so-arbeitet-das-fa...
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Lobbyismus-Koenig-Bertelsma...
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>However, going after the posters (and even just identifying them) takes a long time.
That doesn't justify censorship in any way. You sound like a government shill.
Arvato was contracted by Facebook to enforce their own terms of service and comply with the law. They are free to contract any company they like to operate on their platform. It's not the government that chose Arvato.
If you think that law is the result of lobbying alone you haven't followed to large public debate that happened over this topic the last year at all.
And please refrain from name-calling. This doesn't make your arguments look any better.
Like I said:
>Right now, many people are cheering, because it works in their favor, but they're too shortsighted to realize that it'll eventually be used against them, too.
The problem is that hate speech is the most generic term ever and can be used (and already has been used) to censor anything.
>People were punished for internet posts
Yes, I mentioned that, but they didn't start an investigation against all authors of deleted posts. Millions of posts and pages with millions of followers were deleted without any legal repercussions. If the post is not enough concern to start an official legal investigation, there's no legal ground to delete it.
You are defending censorship. Saying you sound like a government shill is putting it very nicely.
Evidence?
The evidence that such systems endanger safety, meanwhile, should be obvious to anyone who has read about how surveillance has been used, from totalitarian states to even liberal democracies (even in the somewhat recent US history), as well as knowledge of how quickly the latter could turn into the former.
At what point along the path to that dystopia are you going to recognize that a problem exists and fight against it? It's far better to detect and try to fix problems before they spiral out of control. If you're waiting until you see a stereotypical Orwellian dystopia, it's too late.
> surveillance that is being done is promulgating a safe and stable society
Although many people claim surveillance is correlated with safety, there is very little evidence of it having any benefit.
> not toeing the sky-is-falling line doesn't do much for those numbers by my username.
That's not from a any party line, but instead is probably a reaction by the people trying to prevent a dystopian future. Pretending that problems don't exist just because they are not yet sufficiently terrible is how small problems grow into larger problems.
> is undermining the rule of law.
We've seen a many examples of that in recent times. I you believe the US is properly ruled by laws, you haven't been paying attention. We've had a two-tier justice system for such a long time it's spawned slang phrases such as "driving while black". Hang out with public defenders for a few days if you need any more proof.