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Comment by samcday | Hacker News Reader

Conundrums like this make my head spin when I try to consider my position on Internet freedoms.

On the one hand I believe the Internet should be a truly personalized, private interface for humans all over the world to be able to communicate freely and privately - safe from censorship, mass-surveillance, profiling, and so on.

On the other hand I also believe if the Internet was that way, then it would mean that these elements of society, the ones that seek to horrifically and tragically exploit the most vulnerable of us, would be able to do so relatively unimpeded.

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Conundrums like this used to make my head spin.

Then I realized that nothing about moving humans online made humans magically more virtuous than they are in meatspace, and the tools we've used to audit and intercept bad-behaving humans in the real world have merit online too.

There's a reason so much motion online in the past two decades has been in the direction of "de-wild-Westing" it.

It does make direct coercive power online (ie. violence) difficult. I agree with you, but I do think that the internet reduces the harm inflicted by human vices

A helping thought is that those that commit assault of children don't generally consider the possibility of getting caught and will use their personal phone and tools rather than technology that are safe from censorship and mass-surveillance. Sexual assault is not part of rational thinking.

The major problem is when someone want to earn money by becoming a distributor that sits between producer and consumer, like the one in the article, and those people usually do consider the risk of getting caught. There is however a silver lining in that those are quite few and tend to become major target for law enforcement and sooner or later the opsec will have a flaw. It is questionable if Internet can ever become so safe that a person can be one of a handful few that earn millions for years without giving out any clues to whom they are.

So to me this resolve conundrum. Neither criminal is likely to operate unimpeded even when the Internet become safer from censorship and mass-surveillance.

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