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> Policing the airwaves and internet pipes hardly qualifies as some major abuse of human rights

The leaders of today are not the same as those of tomorrow - sweeping powers to invade anyone's privacy and communications could easily be used for nefarious purposes. I don't trust our current leaders with such powers, much less potentially worse ones.

> Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally if not mistaken. Strong encryption is open source as you've pointed out. There's no law against using those open source libraries, nor any discussion to try to censor/outlaw them, AFAIK.

Do you really think things will stay this way?

It seems to me that TFA is just the next step on a slow, but steady, march towards an authoritarian nightmare - once they've worn us down some more, there will be serious moves against encryption (it's happened before, and politicians have been bringing it up a lot in the past 10 years or so).

While I don't agree that your argument was high-quality:

Paul Graham:

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

News Guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

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

Thanks for clarifying and stating your opinion about the quality of my comment. However, seems a bit too broad-stroke to use downvoting for both the (lack of) quality of the comment and to express disagreement.

I do not personally have downmod capabilities, but I don't think it is necessarily too broad: If you interpret it as "People shouldn't read this", it seems reasonable.

I think equating "I disagree" with "people shouldn't read this" is problematic for a forum that wants to encourage discourse.

Revise that slightly to 'it is a waste if time to read this' maybe.

I downvote quite rarely in HN over disagreeing with someone. Usually it is when I don't feel the reply adds any value, and is actually negative for the discourse.

That is, e.g doesn't reach me anything about the opposing position, or is argumentative without any substance, but distracting from comments that are more constructive.

Of course other people use different judgement. At the same time, HN doesn't hide comments to a great extent. Even 'dead' comments are optionally visible (with the 'showdead' setting) and quite a few of us read HN with that on. It's very rare for downvotes to silence people here who aren't actively disruptive.

Couple that with first enabling downvotes when people hit a certain karma threshold, and various other limitations, and HN is free of a lot of the downvote problems of other places.

That to me makes it less of an issue if people downvote to signal disapproval here.

Often initial downvotes will be countered when people feel a comment has been downvotes too much as well.

HN doesn't want to encourage discourse, it wants to encourage worthwhile discourse, and the distinction is significant. Consider "people shouldn't read this" as short for "Having made the mistake of wasting my time reading this, I will flag it to help others to not make the same mistake."

I thought it was a comment that deserved an upvote.

But I always always downvote complaints about downvotes, such as your edit.

Assuming that US citizens are safe, that doesn't apply to citizens of other countries. So even it the US and the UK respect their own citizens' rights (Snowden showed they don't) they won't respect other people's rights. And then surveillance becomes a tool against a countries and policies the US and UK don't agree with regardless if these are a genuine threat or not. So yeah, it is kind of a big problem.

> Disagree on hypocrisy. US still affords significant freedoms and largely respects human rights.

If you are US citizen maybe, for the rest of the world. Definitively not.

Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilians in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is not an example of "respect of humans rights".

> Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilian in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is an example of "respect of humans rights"

This is a good point, I think. The US has an appalling record on human rights (aside from your examples, arming terrorists and overthrowing democratically elected governments spring to mind) - as long as we're talking about the rights of non-Americans.

Take a gander at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Notable_individuals

Some of those individuals were guilty of little more than political activism but experienced real harm (e.g. deportation) thanks to surveillance overreach.

Disagree. The end goal has always been to make civilian use of encryption in a such a way as to prevent government from being able to intercept communication illegal. That’s where we will end up.

Four lights. Nice try, Madred.

The US, by their own admission, is "killing people based on metadata" [0].

Which in practice is done by using machine learning [1] on huge data sets gathered with that global surveillance enabled trough Five Eyes.

Because the army of humans that could manually sort trough those zettabytes of data has yet to be cloned. All that ends up in the fancy-sounding "disposition matrix" [2] aka the USGs kill-list. It's just systems upon systems doing their thing and nobody is directly responsible or accountable for anything that ends up happening, like when yet another 30 Afghani farmers get "splatted" by accident [3].

Considering how this has been going on for close to two decades, and the US has a very convenient way going about the casualty statistics [4], I guess these Afghani farmers are just another rounding error in the "war on terror". Figures, because before that they were mostly considered biometric cattle [5] and lab-rats for fantasies about "full-spectrum surveillance" [6].

Note: Under Trump, the USG now even stopped releasing their shined up drone statistics. So it's pretty much impossible to know the full scale about what's still going on to this day.

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

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

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/us-drone-strik...

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...

[5] https://www.wired.com/2010/09/afghan-biometric-dragnet-could...

[6] https://we-make-money-not-art.com/big-eye-kabul-surveillance...

How do people post such comments? Do you have these lists of source links just saved somewhere or do you just do it on the spot?

It's just stuff that sticks in my mind as noteworthy over the years and decades of surfing the web, following those particular topics.

I mostly remember the headline, Google does the rest of leading me back to the article.

It's impressive, thanks for taking the time.