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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Could the answer be to disallow companies from selling products to these regimes? Or even just to make it mandatory for companies to consider human rights and laws in their country when operating abroad, so selling to a regime or individual who breaks them would be illegal?

Seems like that could stop stuff like this stone dead, and make it very hard for tyrannical regimes to get any good technology at all.

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The researchers are hoping the government will add software like this to its list of "dual-use" goods (things which can be used both for civilian and military applications) in the Canadian export restrictions.

The entire West could do this, and in 10 years time either the Russians or the Chinese would have filled the gap.

So then you've got a bunch of authoritarian regimes that are censoring the Internet, and the stability (perceived or otherwise) they've got is dependent on countries who don't care about human rights.

Giving easy soft power to the Russians and Chinese isn't ideal.

Letting Russia and China fill that gap is in-line with the "good guy" position that The West likes to market itself as. It would also be much easier to draw the battle lines and get the population on board with a war when this distinction actually exists.

If The West continues to do the stuff that the bad guys do and use the reason "well, if we didn't do it they would" then what's the difference between The West and the bad guys?

That rationale you've proposed as akin to admitting that the Russians and Chinese are right.

As someone already said, it's a slippery slope to evil.

The answer is to do nothing. You want to make our country as bad as the countries that use these filters in the first place -- tyrannies.

Oh come on, plenty of goods already have their sale restricted without any effect on the "freedom" of the people.

Restricting internet filtering technology, just like military hardware and encryption technology, simply imposes higher costs on regimes which might not be able to afford them. It's not perfect, but a viable option if promoting freedom of expression is a policy the West wants to pursue.

Bluntly, I can't sufficiently disagree with your assertion about not impacting the "freedom" of people, and in being somehow worth it.

The fact that you seem aware of/to be hinting at the pre-1996 Encryption Export Restrictions makes this even more confusing, since the fallout from that is well-described and broadly negative. (e.g. netscape having to ship a purposefully weaker RSA implementation, which given the difficulty of obtaining the US implementation, ended up with even _domestic_ users being compromised).

No, not only do I think it's "not perfect" I think it's overtly worse than doing nothing, given the increased legislative burdeon/pitfalls, reduced trust in US and bad optics as far as being consistent in what we stand for. Many of the nations we might most worry about have already shown that complexity is no barrier towards implementation, or else we wouldn't be having such a "fun time" with nuclear nonproliferation, something far more locked down _and_ far more difficult to implement compared to internet filtering.

I'm not going to say there shouldn't be a line, I'm generally not a fan of how much in the manner of military arms we spread around the globe, but my principle is always to err on the side of less restrictions rather than more, especially when it doesn't seem to accomplish the stated goal and in many cases will amount to cutting off your nose to spite your face, and _especially_ when it sets a precedent/lowers the bar for govt intervention.

Restrictions on the export of cryptographic technology is definitely something that can be argued makes us less free. Fortunately many die hards have put massive effort into exporting cryptography and have effectively won at this point.

But this is the other way around. Weaker encryption hurts people, but people in other countries are more free if their governments are restricted from getting this censorship technology.

Unfortunately then they will simply move abroad to somewhere they can operate, assuming the employees want to live in those locations - and assuming the employees can't work offset in Canada.

That's alright. "But somebody's going to do it, why not me" is a slippery slope to evil.

I agree.

That's what the guys at the Nuremberg trials said too.

Let them move abroad then. If they want to work on the tools to prop up a dictatorship, they can go live in one.

The burden is on tech-workers. They should make sure for which company they are selling their talents.

It's on more than just them.

Sounds like a burden for the salespeople.

There are already plenty of companies outside of Canada selling backbone-scale monitoring and intervention. The price of such solutions might not even go up very much if Canada decided to make it illegal for their own companies to sell such products.

It would not be a good move for the Canadian government.

It's just a few customers that they'd have to prevent, not the products.

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