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.
Sorry, your argument is bullshit.
"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 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.
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.
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.
You're exactly right, "Your only chance to win would be insurgency or guerrilla warfare." but I'll add "with guns."
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?
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.
Wait, how does that work? Does HN track upvotes for posts disliked by the mods, and somehow penalize the associated accounts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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.
the ultima ratio is to actually use the gun. for 99% of threats, showing it off is good enough.
Are you a pacifist, incidentally? Can you really think of no valid reason why a citizen might need to wound or kill someone?
Yes, if you're hunting, it's a tool.
sure it isn't.
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?
don't worry, i suspect your government will be ramming this answer down your throat by year's end.
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.