Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like, to ensure privacy, we need an equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction: the strategic introduction of a secondary Nash equilibrium that's so bad that it makes it obvious that we should choose the primary equilibrium. Right now, people have no clear sense on what "a gradual erosion of privacy at the hands of the government" really means. We haven't seen a 100% solid example of what any country would do with that power, yet (though China is getting close.)

But imagine if some crazy billionaire set up some sort of autonomous decentralized system that constantly attempted to MITM all the same systems the government likes wiretapping; and then, if it managed to extract any data from that attack, it would find names in that data, and put bounties out on those people on assassination markets (paid from anonymous accounts previously set up by the billionaire.)

Now the choice is between some people dead, and a lot of people dead! Everyone get on board the privacy train!

In a way isn't this what web technologies did?

That is-- pick an insanely fast development cycle where piecemeal/baroque security approaches simply cannot keep up. Eventually you arrive at a place where the whole endeavor become a giant tinder box just waiting to go down in flames. But that forced browser vendors to say, "Ok, let's just assume everything is constantly on fire, cordon everything off into flame retardant boxes, and improve our response time by many orders of magnitude."

If anything ever gets too hot from the thousands of strangers I casually let in the front door I simply move to another building and recycle the burning one.

Meanwhile I treat my Debian install like a prized piece of Shaker furniture. You'd have to be a goddammned 19th century furniture historian with your credentials showing before I let you anywhere near my brittle little museum.

But we aren't "ensuring" privacy; we're inventing whole new forms of privacy. There has never been a private and secure channel to communicate with thousands of strangers across the world. Simply acting like this brand new thing is an obvious and unquestioned good is naive.

This "never before seen" argument cuts both ways, though. There has also never been a full, verbatim record of all of one's communications, personal notes, searches of the equivalent of the world's largest encyclopedia, precise location over time, and myriad other details, carried in one's pocket and/or magically copied to a central location at which someone can perform instantaneous bulk keyword searches. The raw data and processing power over that data that governments have, now, is completely unprecedented in the history of the world.

We used to be protected by the ephemeral nature of 99% of life and by the inability for anyone to centrally view or mechanically process the other 1% (letters, diaries, etc). This is just as much argument for strong protection as your argument goes against strong protection.

At a point in time, simply writing in your villages native tongue and posting it around the world could have afforded the same benefits. Private communication has been the cornerstone of civilisation for many hundreds and thousands of years and will do for many more to come. I should not be vilified for my want of privacy.

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