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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

Nothing to worry about if you're not a criminal, if you're not trying to unionize (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43507728) and if you're not trying to reveal government wrongdoing (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowe...).

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I get the sarcasm. But what is the solution really? Letting actual criminals hide behind online chat networks? Or making sure that there is always a valid reason for their communication to be read, so we don't have such abuse made against honest people?

> Letting actual criminals hide behind online chat networks?

Yes. we should. See below for why.

> Or making sure that there is always a valid reason for their communication to be read, so we don't have such abuse made against honest people?

If there's a backdoor, it will get exploited to hurt "honest people".

So then the question is how do we make sure it can't be exploited? Or is the privacy of racist and yo mama jokes on the PSN network more important than catching criminals or terrorists?

We can't. That's just how it is.

So it's either privacy for everyone, or no privacy for anyone.

Solution to what? Crime has been falling for decades, and if law enforcement can't spy on communication quite as easily as it used to, the increase of other surveillance more than makes up for it. They are crying about "going dark", when 50 years ago, there were barely any surveillance cameras.

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