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This is a brilliant comment except for the fact these weapons you presumably own will never, ever be able to overthrow the US government; a few hackers employed by Russia already did that anyway.

Secondly, if what you say is true I assume, given the refusal to follow large parts of the rest of the constitution, you are planning to overthrow them as we speak?

Finally, I’m concerned that your dream of overthrowing a bad/illegal government, while utterly hopeless, is causing tens of thousands of deaths and about 100000 people being shot per yer. But hey, that imaginary overthrowing the government thing is worth it...

yeah, we're in agreement. there will be no overthrow, instead the government (and all governments) will simply take away more and more of your rights, until they're all gone. both the ones you like, and the ones you don't like. doesn't matter; they're all going out the window, slowly but surely.

next on the list: encryption and data privacy. and there are plenty of useful idiots out there who think encryption somehow harms children, they will come out of the woodwork at exactly the right time, and scream the loudest and make the least sense, you can be sure of that.

While the parent made a partially correct comparison, this whole thread is turning into a giant contest on highlighting where it doesn't work and then trying logic fallacies of all sorts. What's wrong with you, people?

Surely, not every argument. I don't think arguments like "legally owned guns are frequently stolen and used by criminals" works for strong cryptography. However, things like "more ____ control laws would reduce deaths", "high-____ should be banned because they too often ____", "____ are rarely used in self-defense" or "a majority of adults, including ____, support common sense ____ control" can be tried. I just took those from the first search result for "gun control", picking few that I was able to adapt without rephrasing too much.

Heck, I can see even how "more ____ control leads to fewer suicides" can be pulled. In glorious Russia we already have this train of thought running at full-speed, just with "Internet censorship" instead of "strong cryptography".

So while parent comment is obviously biased, it has some valid point. Not sure if its validity means anything useful, though.

____

Note, I explicitly don't evaluate any claims validity here, and must remind that even if "A does X" is true, and even though "A is similar to B in some respects", that doesn't mean that "B does X" is true.

Edit: ouch, can't flag myself. :(

>, they will DEMAND it at any cost. indeed, many of them will only be upset if it DOESN'T happen...

You can see it already happening, almost everywhere with mandatory vaccinations...

So if I go crazy armed with military grade encryption, how many school kids can I kill before the cops get me?

Sorry, your argument is bullshit.

This violates the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please don't do that, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Besides frequently being uncivil, it leads to massively poorer comment threads, as demonstrated below.

If you encrypt something, isn't it because you're trying to hide child molestation and sexual exploitation footage?

"Think of the children" is one of the most powerful cards there is, and it will be played in full force by governments, only less elegantly than you just did.

I think the best way to counter this argument to people who don't know what they're talking about is to tell them that encryption is what keeps hackers from stealing their bank details, etc.

If you don't want guns, maybe you should repeal the second amendment instead of ignoring it. Same goes for the first.

This made me laugh: as a non-American I am so happy that my country is civilized enough to not to have a "second amendment".

Insulting other nations as uncivilized is one of the worst things you can do in an internet flamewar, where by 'worse' I mean 'producing more of the same, only more so'. We ban accounts that comment like this, so please don't do it again.

More generally, please don't post unsubstantive comments. The combination of uncivil+informationless is particularly toxic.

Upvoters: if you upvote this kind of thing, eventually your upvotes will not count.

> Upvoters: if you upvote this kind of thing, eventually your upvotes will not count.

Wait, how does that work? Does HN track upvotes for posts disliked by the mods, and somehow penalize the associated accounts?

>"This made me laugh: as a non-American I am so happy that my country is civilized enough to not to have a "second amendment."

And your comment might make others laugh for its ignorance.

Perhaps you should read up a bit on US history, the circumstances of its' founding and the "actual" origins of the second amendment?

It's not some provision that was proposed by a bunch of "uncivilized" gun nuts:

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/2nd-amendment.ht...

Out of curiosity can you share what is your country?

You and your fellow citizens are incapable of organizing against your government in the event that it becomes dangerous to its constituents. Congratulations!

I am glad to live in a country whose founders had the foresight that allowing a government to leverage weaponry / violence against its citizens without giving its citizens the same leverage was just a bad, bad idea.

That is the real reason for the 2nd amendment, not so I can defend myself against home intruders. That is a secondary argument.

Except that this time the difference between a regular army and a militia would be far beyond just the color of their coat.

Having weapons at home can barely counter law enforcement, let alone a professional military force.

This time there's more technology supporting each area of warfare: logistics, reconnaissance, equipment, vehicles...

A militia, however organized, has everything to lose against an regular army in the 21st century. In fact, chances are you would die before you are in range to fire your weapon.

Your only chance to win would be insurgency or guerrilla warfare.

Guerilla warfare... without guns?

You're exactly right, "Your only chance to win would be insurgency or guerrilla warfare." but I'll add "with guns."

Good luck shooting at an Apache helicopter with a mounted minigun with your semi-automatic gun.

That argument would be much more effective if we didn't have groups like ISIS taking the piss out of the US.

You are absolutely correct and it's a horrible state of affairs.

There's still no need to starve the beast and remove one of the few weapons we have against the slaughtering of our rights and freedoms.

Just being able to purchase guns of reasonable firepower without scrutiny is extremely important to the freedom of our posterity and their ability to organize.

I know this almost makes me sound like some sort of radical terrorist, but these ideals are at the core of our Constitution and to not value these ideals is to be devoid of true patriotism.

Wait, you're calling his argument bullshit? You didn't even make an argument, you just said something completely nonsensical.

This is the sort of wretched flamewar that we ban accounts for if they do this again. Please don't do it again. HN is not a place for nasty battles.

> You didn't even make an argument

He did. He said the children in Newtown's kindergarden and Columbine School were not killed with encryption. It is a pretty big difference. For a non-American this is a pretty good argument, IMO.

What nonsense. It's obvious what the parent comment meant. Law abiding gun owners by definition do not kill innocent children, just like law abiding people do not use encryption nefariously. Encryption and guns are both tools, with nothing intrinsically good or evil about them.

Yet law abiding gun owners were punished and had their rights stripped throughout most of the world on the pretense that it would somehow help stop crime, despite the quite glaringly obvious fact that criminals by definition do not care about following laws. Thus, only law abiding people are hindered. Criminals will still use encryption and guns, while law abiding citizens will be rendered unable to defend themselves, either electronically or physically.

I find it amazing that I need to spell this out for you.

Further to this, the reality is politicians who want to undermine information security don't give a damn about protecting their citizens/subjects. That's just the excuse to make the poison pill more palatable. What this is about, and what gun control is about, is right there in the name: control. It's about having a monopoly on security and force, so the populace will be less independent and easier to manage. At the very least, if you make enough things illegal you can jail whomever you like, because at some point it will become impossible to avoid breaking the law. The US is already there.

We've already seen government agencies in the US targeting specific political groups. I don't follow politics in other countries much but it would hardly surprise me if that happens elsewhere. It certainly has throughout history. How far will that go this time? No matter what side of the aisle you're on, it should frighten you, because the tool you use on your enemies when you're in power--and any tool you create to beat them up more effectively--is then available for your enemy to use on you when you inevitably lose power.

I find it shocking how many people who clamor for electronic freedom and an uninterfered-with internet are perfectly happy to cede their rights and independence in other areas to the government without so much as a grumble. Learn from history, FFS.

>I find it shocking how many people who clamor for electronic freedom and an uninterfered-with internet are perfectly happy to cede their rights and independence in other areas to the government without so much as a grumble...

This is absolutely the most shocking thing I have come to notice recently, which just shows that these people have reasons spoon fed to them from somewhere, (knowingly or unknowingly) and have not really thought it through..

What I feel is that the while modern society feels not susceptible to the evils,oppressions and exploitations that were prevalent 100 years ago, while most people were poorly educated, this seems to be just a fallacy. And educated people can be manipulated just as easily by feeding them some kind of "reason" and selective "statistics" from certain "reputable" sources or authority.

> It's about having a monopoly on security and force, so the populace will be less independent and easier to manage.

Having an entity with a monopoly on violence is like half the point of a government. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

Uh huh. Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century? How does a disarmed and helpless populace look in those circumstances?

And since you think the government should be trusted to mete out all force, I'm certain you'll have no trouble handing the government all your passwords and keys, right? Maybe mail them a copy of your car keys and house keys too, since they're so trustworthy?

You trust them to protect your physical safety, to protect your life, if you're willing to hand over your right to self protection. Surely you then trust them with your data and property?

> And since you think the government should be trusted to mete out all force, I'm certain you'll have no trouble handing the government all your passwords and keys, right? Maybe mail them a copy of your car keys and house keys too, since they're so trustworthy?

> You trust them to protect your physical safety, to protect your life, if you're willing to hand over your right to self protection. Surely you then trust them with your data and property?

I don't think that's the same thing at all. I trust my parents with my life, but I wouldn't want them to read my online conversations. They don't have a key to my house, nor the passwords to my computer and various accounts, and I'd like to keep it that way. I see no contradiction here.

> Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century?

Have you?

Before Hitler came to power, the Weimar government was destabilized by - among other things - a latent civil war between armed paramilitary extreme-left and extreme-right groups. Hitler himself relied on such groups (from the right) to stage his first attemt to come to power via a coup. Even after he got elected, the groups were a cornerstone of his power.

The only purpose of a gun - a handgun in particular - is to wound and kill people, something civilians have no business doing. That's not the case with encryption.

the primary purpose of a gun is to deter possible aggressors from starting trouble with you.

the ultima ratio is to actually use the gun. for 99% of threats, showing it off is good enough.

I've used a handgun to signal for help, to find lost people in the woods in Alaska, to hunt, to scare away bears, and for fun. And on a few occasions, I've been very glad to have a handgun with me stateside, because I came quite close to needing to use it to protect myself. Fortunately I was able to negotiate those situations without using force.

Are you a pacifist, incidentally? Can you really think of no valid reason why a citizen might need to wound or kill someone?

Guns used to be tools, but they aren't in much of the US. That doesn't mean they can't be, but they aren't used as tools, so they've lost a lot of their value.

Yes, if you're hunting, it's a tool.

> That's not the case with encryption.

sure it isn't.

> Encryption and guns are both tools

Fireworks are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous.

Sulfuric acid is a tool, but need to be regulated because is dangerous.

Plutonium is a tool, but needs to be regulated because is dangerous.

Opioids are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous.

Cars are tools, but it's use needs to be regulated because are dangerous.

I find it amazing that I need to spell this out for you.

Would you please not do flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong or irritating some other comments are? We're really trying to avoid the downward spiral here.

The analogy is flawed, and the final sentence is condescending.

All things in your list have an inherent physical danger. Neither encryption nor cryptography are themselves dangerous, they're a means of encoding some other thing which may or may not be dangerous into something whose danger cannot be determined.

Imperfect analogy, but crypto is more like a safe than anything you list. An ensuing argument is, we need to regulate (crypto) safes not because they are themselves dangerous, but because their contents might be.

The means of encryption-decryption, code, is considered free speech (Bernstein vs U.S. 9th Circuit, and Junger v Daley, 6th Circuit). Thus far crypto is itself protect, but the usage of crypto is an open question.

With a real safe, police with probable cause can get a warrant, and forcibly gain access to the safe and see the contents. This isn't possible with crypto if the key owner refuses to cooperate, and why there's the ensuing problem of sanctioning the person for contempt of court when ordering access and they don't cooperate.

The dispute has nothing to do with analogies though, it has to do with a power transfer. Crypto permits some transfer of power from the sovereign to the individual. And that has altered the social contract. It's done. And now after the fact we're trying to sort out the consequences of that power transfer, and whether or not the sovereign gets to reign it back in, and how. And that's unanswered.

> If we could restrict the use of encryption by the bad guys without compromising it's use by the good guys

oh, don't you worry, the politicians will do it anyway, with much public support, and then you will sound like the crazy, paranoid one arguing for military grade assault encryption in the hands of the dangerous, villainous public.

edit: i see you deleted the part i quoted. makes sense. cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing. feels like razor blades in the mind!

If your idea of reasoned discussion is responding to my comments with logical fallacies, there's no point in wasting any more time on you. Good day.

This breaks the HN guidelines. Accounts that are uncivil and flame others eventually get banned, so would you please (re)-read the following, and abide by them? That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Another thing we're trying to avoid is the generic ideological tangent: that's when a topic with something specific in it (Australian government current encryption plans) gets diluted into topics like "pacifism" and "genocide", about which no HN thread has anything new to say, but plenty of people will get agitated and sucked into battle. This is the reason why the guidelines say: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

Nope. The argument was that law-violating gun owners kill children (and others) while law-violating encryption does not.

I doubt encryption does anything all by itself. And apparently, encryption-using terrorists--who would be violating the law if such laws were in place--do kill children. Manchester, you know, it just happened. Nice. Berlin. Stockholm. Pretty soon, it'll just be a "name the city" game where the only question is how bad the most recent terrorist attack they suffered was compared to the rest.

And just as gun control laws do precisely dick to stop criminals from committing their crimes--because laws aren't magic, and they don't bend reality to make guns disappear as soon as the law is signed--encryption laws will be just as efficacious at stopping terrorists from using encryption. Like some wannabe martyr gives a shit about a fine he'll never pay and time he'll probably never serve in some resort prison?

Of course law aren't magic, but of course they can have impact on society such as the reduce of weapons.

> So if I go crazy armed with military grade encryption, how many school kids can I kill before the cops get me?

don't worry, i suspect your government will be ramming this answer down your throat by year's end.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do this with.

If you want to comment here, you need to be a good community member. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all—and certainly avoiding ideologically inflammatory, nationalistically nasty comments.

The problem is the fallacy consisting in the idea that that owning a gun puts you in equal terms with the government. That used to be the case maybe circa 1776, but no longer the case in 2017, 241 years later.

The government operates a regular, professionally trained armed forces with modern, military grade equipment. Your weapons can barely counter law enforcement, let alone an army.

Good luck solving a dispute with the government by firing a semi-automatic gun at an Apache Helicopter firing you back with 6000 rounds per minute.

>"freedom-loving internet users will soon know how gun owners feel. every single bogus argument for gun control or "assault weapons" bans can, and will be, used against internet speech freedom and information privacy, now that the western political establishment has taken it upon themselves to strip you of your free speech rights after seeing how trivial it was stripping you of your guns, and how much enthusiasm their populaces had for it."

Wow what a total straw man. Firstly this is an article about Australia not the U.S. But I will get into why Australia is particularly relevant in your poor choice of straw man in a second.

Firstly, "Gun control" is not about wholesale elimination of gun ownerships but rather rather having some policy that permits its' ownership while still accounting for public safety. Your sentiment is typical FUD propaganda employed by lobbying groups like the NRA in the US - "they're coming to take your guns!" By the way the NRA is among the most powerful lobbying groups in the US[1], there is no such encryption/privacy lobby.

The central talking points in "Gun Control" are enforcing some common sense provisions like "back ground checks" to prevent mentally people unstable from owning guns. Or restricting civilian ownership of military-style assault rifles that don't have a compelling civilian use case in either hunting or self defense.

Australia has implemented both of these common sense provisions mentioned above - forbidding semi-automatic assault rifles and mandating back ground checks and waiting periods for gun purchases. And guess what? Australia doesn't the mass shootings that are so common they start to overlap each other's news cycles. There is no epidemic city like Chicago where 762 people in a single year were killed by guns[2] And plenty of Australians own guns. Australia implemented these after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996. And not only does Australia have no shortage of people that own guns but gun ownership is on the rise [3]. You know what isn't on the rise though? Mass shootings of innocent civilians these went from 11 per year to zero after changes in legislation proposed in the wake of the Port Arthur Massacre[3].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/inside-the-power-...

[2] http://time.com/4635049/chicago-murder-rate-homicides/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/05/guns-...