Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making
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All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were like this in the west.
Law enforcement officers (and politicians) must confront the simple fact that they must accept the restraints that the law places on them, even if it means letting the bad guy get away with it. Getting the bad guy at any cost ("Tango and Cash" style) makes a fun movie but it undermines the freedoms that our ancestors (by both blood and principal) fought and died for.
Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US.
Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it other than to respect and protect them.
This is a massive difference with other systems that lots of people, both inside and outside the US are not aware of.
Take the right to bare arms as an example. In most other nations, if it exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of government.
Here's the key difference between "grant" and "recognize": The government can't take away that which it does not own, did not and cannot grant.
An example of a right (well, a privilege) government can take away is your driver's license. They grant it and they can take it away.
In the case of firearms, the US government does not have the ability to confiscate weapons because that is not a right the government granted and, therefore, they don't have unilateral power to cancel that right with a simple bill. In fact, it takes a tremendously complex agreement across all States and the federal government to make any changes to the US Constitution (2/3 majority in the Senate, House and all 50 State Legislatures). Even that does not guarantee government to have the right to eliminate rights.
This is good. This means, among other things, that the government can't take your freedom of speech away because they do not own it, they did not grant it. It is recognized as a fundamental right. All rights in the Bill of Rights are equal in this sense (as far as I know). If we weaken one of them (as many want to do with firearms) you run the risk of opening Pandora's box and exposing the people to government control of rights.
It's an interesting problem.
Coming from this perspective it is hard to understand why people in any nation would want to live in an environment where the government owns and grants rights --and can take them away at will. If the idea is that government works for us --they are our representatives-- why in the world would it make sense that they would be able to take away our rights? Imperfect analogy: It's like a project manager hiring a worker and then having that worker fire the project manager.
PS.: A lot of anti-gun activists keep pointing at places like New Zealand and their gun confiscation and buy-back programs. The typical cry is "We should do the same". Well, we can't. Government did not grant, nor does it own that right. And it can't take it away. In many ways this kind of activism is nothing less than futile and even nonsensical. It's almost like demanding that we change the gravitational constant in that it is about as likely.
> Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US.
> Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it other than to respect and protect them.
> This is a massive difference with other systems that lots of people, both inside and outside the US are not aware of.
> Take the right to bare arms as an example. In most other nations, if it exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of government.
> Here's the key difference between "grant" and "recognize": The government can't take away that which it does not own, did not and cannot grant.
> An example of a right (well, a privilege) government can take away is your driver's license. They grant it and they can take it away.
> In the case of firearms, the US government does not have the ability to confiscate weapons because that is not a right the government granted and, therefore, they don't have unilateral power to cancel that right with a simple bill. In fact, it takes a tremendously complex agreement across all States and the federal government to make any changes to the US Constitution (2/3 majority in the Senate, House and all 50 State Legislatures). Even that does not guarantee government to have the right to eliminate rights.
This argument is a prime example against the point you are trying to make. With guns, the government is constantly eroding that right by narrowing the scope of what constitutes a legally permissible gun. Wicard vs Filburn is another example of government rewriting the limits of their power without the consent of the people. Why did prohibition require an amendment but drugs are scheduled today without the necessity for constitutional amendments?
All organizations seek to expand their influence and power over time.
State and local governments had outlawed alcohol since the founding. If outlawing alcohol were somehow special, that wouldn't have been possible.
That's because the scope of state power is very wide in the Constitution. The federal government is much more constrained (or was intended to be), and outlawing alcohol with an act of Congress would be a violation of the 10th Amendment.
Interestingly, even the 1st Amendment did not originally prevent states from infringing on the freedom of speech. It begins "Congress shall make no law...". Later the 14th Amendment changed that through "incorporation", which is a process I don't fully understand.
Commerce clause, among others. There are all kinds of federal regulations and bans that have been upheld as constitutional. Claiming that they aren't really is wishful, not legal, thinking.
> Interestingly, even the 1st Amendment did not originally prevent states from infringing on the freedom of speech
This isn't correct. It's the due process clause that is operative, and the supreme Court has ruled that states can't remove rights, including those technically protected only from the federal gov, without due process.
Edit: There’s also a “due process” clause in the Fifth Amendment, but it’s not the one used for incorporation (although it’s been used for so-called “reverse incorporation”).
This is true.
IANAL, but my guess is that a lot of this mucking around with firearms regulations is because people have not said "enough!" and taken it all the way up to the US Supreme Court (except for a few cases I am aware of).
In other words, can California (or any State) really prohibit magazines with more than 10 rounds? Can they really prohibit any kind of carry (concealed or not)? Where exactly is it that they --the government-- acquired the right to do such things.
Again, let's get away from firearms and talk about free speech. This is a stupid example, but, let's say that CA passes a law that makes it illegal to say more than 5 expletives in one minute. Do they have the right and power to pass such a law? No, they don't. They don't have the power to restrict speech AT ALL, because this is a right that is recognized --NOT GRANTED-- in the US constitution. Government does not own it and cannot take it away.
Many would then say: Well, you can't yell "fire" in a theater.
Sure you can! Try it! Well, don't, you'll get in trouble for it. Freedom of speech does not mean you are free from the consequences of what you choose to say. That's another common misconception. You can say whatever you want. And you can enjoy the full consequences of what you said.
The same is true of firearms. You can shoot them anywhere you want. And you can enjoy the consequences of your actions just as well. Just like you can drive your car into a tree if you want to.
This is one of those topics that has been completely twisted and contorted by zealots. In the US it is very simple: Our rights do not come from government. Period. Which means they can't take them away. When they do overstep their bounds we have to go to the courts to put them back in their place. That happens from time to time when people have enough.
I'll give you an example of just how ridiculous things can get. Here in California you basically can't protect yourself in any way. You can't conceal-carry a firearm (like in a purse or holster). You can't have a knife larger than something like a Swiss army knife. You can't have nunchuks, a pipe, a wooden staff, a baseball bat, a chain, nothing. You cannot legally go for a walk with some kind of a self-defense weapon other than a really mean dog or perhaps some pepper spray (2.5 ounces or less). In other words, I can't have two pieces of wood tied together with a rope.
If you think about the concept of a truly free human being on this planet and then contemplate the idea of that person not being able to defend themselves against criminals, well, it's truly surreal.
Like I said, IANAL, and I am not pro or anti firearm at all. I am neutral in this regard. I am looking at the Bill of Rights as a whole, not at any particular right. They are all co-equal and even interconnected. I just think some of the things we are seeing at State levels only exist because enough people haven't had enough and there hasn't been a "mother of all challenges" at the Supreme Court level.
I mean, what's the use of having a Bill of Rights in the US Constitution if any schmuck at the State level can defecate all of these rights at will?
The tenth amendment?
But insofar as some is allowed, the ability of the States to do it is specified in the 10th.
I don't see the relevance of the 10th Amendment to this particular discussion.
EDIT: I see. The person to whom you replied seemed to be looking for the power somewhere, and you are just saying that the states powers are not enumerated (as the federal powers are).
IANSL, but I don’t think so. That would mean states could regulate anything in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech. That makes no sense to me at all because it would effectively make the BofR optional.
Insofar as the 2nd amendment permits gun regulation (the exact contours have not yet been established by the courts), that power is still in the hands of the states.
State regulations on public carry are not a new idea: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/firearm-regionalism-and...
I suspect these are matters still waiting for the "Mother of all Supreme Court Cases". I wish we would take a solid year of time and have the SCOTUS, once and for all, look at this intricate puzzle and lend clarity to a very messy set of situations. Any outcome would be better than the legal limbo in which exist on this matter.
I would much prefer a society without guns BTW. That said, I am not diluted enough to think this is even remotely in the real of the plausible. That's why I prefer to push back against wasting energy trying to go for bans, confiscations and buy-backs that will never happen.
We need to go after the criminal or disturbed minds that seek to cause harm, regardless of the means through which they might accomplish this --from box cutters, through pressure cookers and, yes, guns.
I firmly believe this is an attainable goal. Far more attainable than clashing with the second amendment. This goal isn't without issues. For example, there are privacy laws that, quite literally, prevent a doctor from reporting someone who they believe might cause harm to others.
Nothing is simple. Some things are simpler than others. That does not mean they are easy.
if the government can make these rules and bring these consequences, then what exactly is free about this "free" speech?
north koreans are free to say whatever they want, too, and enjoy the full consequences of what they say.
the only difference is what kind of speech can bring what severity of consequences.
In the one case, if your speech causes harm to others (i.e.: you incite a crowd to attack me) the consequences of your actions lead to legal repercussions.
In the other case all you have to do is look at the supreme ruler the wrong way and you are dead.
This is precisely my case: Our laws come from us, not them, not government.
I lack the cultural context for US but in many other cultures, expressing a valid rational position can be actively harmful to one.
At what point something becomes harassment? Can you give me more details?
Suppose I am actively promoting eating beef in public space near a very religious vegan settlement. Is that speech protected or not?
It is targetting people based on their belief but the whole spectrum of who it is not clear at all unless one intends to assume malice and fill in the gaps. All I would be doing is to promote eating beef because it's good and healthy.
Does placing restrictions on where you can talk violates your free speech despite it being public property? Say, a restraining order or something similar.
In the US, yes, absolutely, it is.
As long as you don't become violent or enter their private property you can say anything you want. You can stand there every day of the week for an entire year with a sign that says something like "religious vegans are criminals" and you are absolutely protected by the US Constitution. The police might come and talk to you to make sure you are not a threat (do you a gun illegally?) but as long as all you are doing is exercising your recognize right to free speech you can do that all day long.
You are only going to be the subject of a restraining order if you are a threat. No judge would grant a restraining order against someone peacefully exercising their first amendment right. If they did, if for some reason the group you are protesting lied and they got a restraining order they would be exposed to pretty serious legal consequences.
I don't particularly enjoy these videos, yet they are an example of how serious these rights are in the US. Some on this thread dismiss them as "just words on a piece of paper". Well, in this case those words made five people with guns walk away from someone they were not legally allowed to harass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJTOrkWUACI
Do this in most countries in the world and you'll find yourself in front of a judge with broken arms, a busted face and possibly almost dead...if you even get to the judge.
No, we can do that. The government can merely assume the power, as governments so often do.
Paper is not a defense. A "Bill of Rights" containing only a single right would be of zero value.
What is a defense is the bundling of recognized rights, as in the Bill of Rights. It's like an alliance: an assault on any one right is an assault on them all. If a large majority of people would rally behind a single right (maybe freedom of speech?), then the right is not seriously in danger (for now). The rights which are in danger need to be bundled so that the whims of a particular time and place do not permanently sacrifice a right.
When a particular right is borderline unpopular -- perhaps the right to keep and bear arms -- that provides a lever to pry away all of our rights, and we must prevent that. When you look at the wave of gun laws being proposed and passed, you'll see how obvious it is that they are an assault on the entire Bill of Rights (for instance "red flag" laws are a clear violation of due process).
The Gun Safety movement is a rerun of the Drug War. A bunch of reasonable-sounding people concerned about their community used as pawns to push a very different agenda. In the case of the Drug War, it was violating the 4th, 5th, 9th and 10th Amendments to oppress political enemies (hippies and blacks). In the case of the Gun Safety movement, it's violating the 1st, 2nd, and 5th Amendments to oppress political enemies (rural/Christian/whatever).
The reason we end up with ridiculous laws -- like harsher punishments for crack than powder; or laws restricting foldable stocks on rifles[1] -- is because those laws are not ridiculous when you understand the real agenda.
[1] If the goal is to reduce murders, then rifles are an absurd place to start. Knives are a much more common murder weapon. So are "Hands, fists, feet, etc.". Even in Texas, where there are few rifle laws. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
The best example of just how stupid the whole "assault ban gun" idea is found in Chicago, where the weekly carnage has not relented in years and the weapon of choice is nearly 100% handguns.
The problem politician have with these issues is that they can't actually get behind the reality of the problems because reality goes against their political power and invalidates all of their vote-gathering tools. If the fear-mongering about "assault rifles" was honestly matched to crime data in the public square they would, at a minimum, look like fools and if portrayed honestly, as liars and manipulators.
We humans are really funny species. Imagine what we could do if we could bring more reason, common sense and honesty into our affairs.
They don't look like your grand father's deer rifle or duck hunting shot gun and instead look like a military weapon, e.g., the Russian AK-47.
With the usual technical and US legal description, the AR-15 is just a "semi-automatic rifle". But due to looks, they get called "assault weapons" like the fully automatic AK-47.
Sooo, some people get headlines talking about "assault rifles".
If your proposal is to ban all semi-auto pistols (including from police) but allow all semi-auto rifles (without allowing state/local restrictions), you might get some traction. Such a plan would be better supported by numbers, better supported by the Constitution (which is talking about militia weapons), and more politically palatable (nobody will say "over my dead body" because they have to change their little gun for a big gun).
Sometimes you just need to be practical and look at the numbers. Just because you don't want a rifle doesn't mean a ban has zero cost or that the cost is somehow not a valid one. Many of our fellow citizens want the freedom to own rifles and you should have some respect for that.
The better case for gun control in every possible way is pistols. But nobody will ever budge on pistols if they sense that it's just a "first step" to confiscating rifles as well. The only way to get any kind of gun control is to earn trust by showing respect for ordinary citizens owning rifles, and from that point of respect you can make reasonable suggestions on pistols.
My guess is this would not pass the constitutional test.
Without being an attorney, I would think the question would be one of an interpretation of the second amendment in the context of the argument. That's where I am having trouble. What is the argument being made in the context of restricting a right?
I know the intent or idea: If you can't fire at a rapid rate you can't hurt as many people per unit time. I get it. And this might be a solid argument. Yet I can see it having lots of holes when applied.
An obvious one has to do with whether or not we can restrict criminals. The answer is obviously "no". This is where a lot of these things fall apart.
If you can guarantee a society without weapons then everyone is comfortable not having any. Introduce asymmetry and the arms race begins.
The other argument is one about unfairly punishing law-abiding citizens.
I have presented this hypothetical in many conversations and nobody ever answers the question. It goes something like this:
Suppose I have you a couple of handguns and assault rifles, all the ammunition you want and trained you in their use at a high level of proficiency.
How long would it be until you take those weapons and shoot a bunch of innocent people?
How long would it be if I threaten to harm your loved ones unless you do it?
How long if I abduct a member of your family and threaten to harm them unless you do it?
If the answers to these questions are "never", how is restricting access to any hardware make us safer?
It does not.
This is a software problem. Brains. Not hardware. If it were a matter of hardware you'd eventually become a mass murderer simply because I gave you firearms and trained you. Not the case. Which means focusing on the hardware is the wrong path.
This is also the wrong path for a very different reason. Again, suppose I gave you all those guns, ammo and training. And 30 years later you haven't harmed anyone and never intend to. And then someone knocks on your door and says: You are a potential criminal because you own guns and therefore I am going to take some of your rights away. Anyone faced with such an accusation would think it is crazy, unfair, unjustified and plain wrong.
Focusing on the hardware is seen by gun owners as that very scenario. They are being told they are criminals. They know they are not and never will be. This strikes a deep nerve that has nothing to do with firearms. It's like telling someone they are criminals just because they own a ski mask. Honest people don't like to be characterized that way. And, as a result, they will defend their right to not be deemed guilty for doing nothing.
That's how the conversation stops and we never fix a thing.
If everyone got on the same boat and we talked about dealing with the real root causes of violence and crime everyone would join in. Call half the country "criminals" and you get nowhere.
I haven't seen any evidence of an arms race in Australia or NZ, for example.
> This is a software problem. Brains. Not hardware.
So it's the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument performed in staccato with additional tedious rhetoric. Could it be that no one has satisfactorily answered your hypothetical questions because despite you obviously thinking that you've cornered someone with your brilliant socratic method, that you've actually just thrown up a few straw men that are not worth delving into?
Their laws prevent it. That's the problem with these comparisons. You have to compare apples to apples. I'm sure they have pretty good gun control in North Korea. There's an app for that.
> Could it be that no one has satisfactorily answered your hypothetical questions because despite you obviously thinking that you've cornered someone with your brilliant socratic method, that you've actually just thrown up a few straw men that are not worth delving into?
No. People don't answer the question because the only honest answer exposes the fallacy in their thinking.
It's very simple, if guns cause violence then giving anyone a gun should turn them into criminals. However, the only way that can happen if for the person to make that decision. The weapon is not the root cause at all.
What is also interesting is that every anti-gun proponent I have presented with this scenario immediately resorts to personal attacks, insults, mischaracterization and more, anything except any approximation of an honest answer.
If you can't turn someone into a killer by handing them a gun, then, what makes a killer? Well, to begin with, not the gun. Maybe magical pixie dust?
I have over thirty years of work in all kinds of technology fields, from the motion picture industry to aerospace, small projects to billion dollar programs. I have yet to see anyone --ANYONE-- solve any problem by IGNORING root causes and focusing on the demonstrably irrelevant. That's the problem with this issue. It has become so polarized and political that nobody, on either side of the argument, wants to address root causes. Because, to borrow the term, these are inconvenient truths.
This is equivalent to: "I have a flat tire. OK, let's change the engine!"
Here's a tip: Insulting me or my argument does not fix the problem, does not save lives and does nothing towards fixing the real problem. If you are a US citizen and are truly interested in saving lives, stop pushing fantasies and get behind going after true root cause analysis. That's the ONLY way we make things better.
I guess I have to ask: What do your root cause analysis of the problem?
Oh, OK. Different then. Had better move on.
> I'm sure they have pretty good gun control in North Korea. There's an app for that.
But this glib comparison with North Korea makes a lot more sense.
> No. People don't answer the question because the only honest answer exposes the fallacy in their thinking.
Well, firstly, the questions just aren't very good. It would be like if I had asked
"Do you not believe children should go to school free from the fear of a mass shooting?"
"Do you think believe people have a right to feel safe?"
But I wouldn't be asking them in good faith.
> This is equivalent to: "I have a flat tire. OK, let's change the engine!"
No it isn't. It's generally considered one of many things governments around the world can do to reduce gun violence.
Problems have multiple causes and solutions.
More guns, more homicide.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
And that it has been the weapon of choice for school shooters.
* What are the numbers behind the statement?
* What policy proposals do you favor and how do you expect them to influence these numbers over what timeframe? What do you expect the side effects to be?
* Help put policies and numbers in context. Which policies are useful and which are not?
You know, if it is that difficult to take the time to run a few google searches before saying something it might be best to not say it at all. You are demonstrably wrong.
I don't understand why people don't take the time to ensure they are working with facts rather than parroting things they heard, or worse, believing things they imagine.
Here, I'll help you a little:
http://memepoliceman.com/which-kind-of-gun-is-used-most-in-s...
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2013/rpt/2013-r-0057.htm
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476409/mass-shootings-in...
https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/mass-shooting-gun-type-data/
All these shootings are horrible. Yet they have nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the software, the brains.
The proof of this statement is ridiculously simple:
Let's say I gave you a couple of handguns, an AR-15 and as much ammunition and training as necessary to make you a highly capable marksman.
After that, how long would it be for you to go out and kill a bunch of people at a mall, on the street or at a school?
Never?
The problem isn't the hardware, is it?
If the people who wrote the constitution had such a good grasp of what the correct fundamental rights were, why did they allow slavery to happen? Why did they only allow land-owning white males to vote? If they were not morally infallible, and we accept that their opinions on those issues were justifiably superceded by future generations, then why are we not allowed to critically examine the rights enumerated in the constitution and question which of them are no longer tenable today, instead of a priori dismissing any possible challenge to the constitution as a stupid "whim of a particular time and place".
I never said that the Bill of Rights covers all possible rights or that the founders were infallible.
Your question about slavery is misguided. The founders were forming a union out of pre-existing states. It was not the founders' intent to interfere with states much at all. Only certain parts of the Constitution prohibit powers to the states, and before the 14th Amendment, the states were not as tightly bound even by the Bill of Rights (e.g. the 1st Amendment starts "Congress shall pass no law...").
The idea that you can form a union of 13 colonies and also make demands of them at the same time goes against the whole idea of the Constitution. The Constitution is a framework, and it only protects rights that were already widely regarded as rights before the union (for instance, the right to bear arms wasn't just made up for the Constitution, similar things existed in many state constitutions already).
The Constituion is amazing not because it was perfect from day one. It is amazing because it expressly limited the power of the government that it was creating (the federal government), and because it turned out to be a surprisingly resilient framework. The Bill of Rights is amazing because it got a surprising number of things right.
Going back to the original article, the 1st and 4th Amendments are still radical after 200+ years.
We can re-examine the 1st, 2nd, 4th, or whatever Amendment you want. But they seem like a good list to me, and once one is lost it is unlikely to be regained peacefully (because losing a right grants power to the government, amd governments don't like to give up power). Majority opinions do fluctuate a lot and if a simple majority could give up the rights of everyone, the entire Bill of Rights would be long gone.
Murder rates have declined dramatically since the founding and still seem to be declining or steady. So I don't want to give up the 2nd Amendment just because we have more media noise about guns, nor the 1st/4th Amendment because police have a harder time decrypting messages now. I find it weird to call rights "untenable" when everything is getting better, not worse. Like, what exactly is the big problem with freedom that it was somehow "tenable" before but now it's not?
What is gun control but the government asserting a right to pierce your privacy to the putative end of arms control?
People don't look at it that way because people are used to looking at X and calling it X, Y and calling it Y, but not realizing both X and Y are subtypes of Z, so chipping away at X is chipping away at Z, even if you want to swear up and down the street it's only -X and not -Z. It is -Z and it is -X. Period.
It's why I've begun to fear the legislator that is seemingly able to break the law by making laws they are not empowered to make, and a politicalized judiciary that doesn't spend their time enforcing a strict obeyance of legislation to common language, and administrative lawmakers in the executive that are never double checked.
The world passed on to the generations after us will be a grim place indeed if we keep leaving them more and more shackled by the overwhelming detritus of the legislative hooliganry of our age.
I'm a firearms owner and I love to hunt but I am not sure that people have a natural right to firearms, and from observation many people should not possess them due to personal negligence surrounding the awesome responsibilities attendant with firearms usage/mis-usage.
There are something like 400M civilian-owned guns in the U.S. If it were an awesome responsibility, then we'd all be dead by now. But murder rates are low and either steady or declining.
It's easy to say that other people seem irresponsible, but we need to look at the data. Firearm accidents resulting in death are very rare.
But I do favor a 1st amendment view of "right to cryptography" rather than a 2nd amendment view of it.
Imagine a bakery puts out a sign that says "the bread you can buy here was not baked by a bakery, it was only recognized to be bread". Does that mean that the bread that comes out of their oven that they earlier stuck dough into was indeed not baked by them?
How does the fact that a piece of paper says something make what it says a fact? It is obviously nonsense that rights could exist without a structure to enforce them. Whether you call it "recognized" or "granted" is completely irrelevant, the fact of the matter is: If the government decides to act as if the right did not exist, then the right does not exist, and governments in general are very well capable of acting as if rights did not exist, and the fact that some piece of paper says "recognize" does not inherently change that, governments in general are also very well capable of ignoring pieces of paper.
The only thing that protects rights is sufficiently many people acting to protect them.
As such how they are worded is no protection - only peoples willingness to resist changes is actual protection against rights being eroded.
If don't live in a country that behaves this way it is likely very difficult to understand how this could be.
I lived in Argentina during the time of military rule. I knew that any negative interaction with police could have terrible consequences for me. Even death. Sure, there were laws in place that were supposed to protect me and others, but that didn't stop anyone from committing atrocities because the culture did not honor laws as is the case in the US. I remember being detained with a group of friends coming out of a movie. We where put-up against a wall, spread legs and arms, frisked, interrogated, harassed, laughed-at and held for over an hour. Once the cops were done having their fun they threw all of our ID's on the ground and let us go.
It took me YEARS after coming to the US to not have my blood pressure rise when interacting with cops. I mean, even having a cop car behind me was stressful. After a while you understand that things here are different. When we say "this is a nation of laws" it isn't something that goes on a bumper sticker, it has real meaning. I have a lot of cop friends and even trained at an Aikido dojo for years that was nearly 90% law enforcement. Context is important and the context is culture and laws.
If you want to argue about what would happen if the US government went off the rails and decided to do as they wished against the population. Well, I am sure there's a good movie in there somewhere. Until then, it's just silly.
That was exactly my point. Hence why I wrote:
> only peoples willingness to resist changes is actual protection against rights being eroded.
What is your point? Even if noone cares about what that piece of paper says, it still has "weight and meaning"? Or are you just repeating what I said using slightly different words, i.e., in a country where people care about what that piece of paper says, what that piece of paper says has weight and meaning?
> If, on the other hand, we are talking about complete anarchy and the end of laws as our guiding principles then, yes, sure, in that case words on paper do not matter. Until then...
So ... a dictatorship is complete anarchy then? Or are you saying that it is inherently impossible for a government to selectively ignore individual laws or sections of the law? Or is it just yet another rephrasing of what I said, i.e., only if sufficiently many people act to recognize, demand, and enforce the rights, will there be rights?
In the US the Bill of Rights is taken very seriously by everyone, from citizens to the heights of government. That's just the way it is.
Forgive me, I just don't know what you are trying to communicate.
And the further point is that there are plenty of people working to undermine those rights, and they don't need to change those words to be successful, they can also change how they are interpreted and how seriously they are taken in order to achieve their goal of undermining those rights, and that is what they usually do.
If we are going to talk about government derailing and doing as they wish then no piece of paper can protect anyone. At that point it becomes about guns and blood. Which sort of drives the point of the second amendment. That scenario is very, very far from reality in the US for more reasons than one.
The US is one of the few (well, I don't think I know of any other) where you can tell a police officer to go to hell and stop harassing you in a public space due to the rights recognized by the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. YouTube is FULL of videos showing these kinds of situations. Anywhere else on earth you are far more likely to end-up in jail or worse.
That happens because, at the end of the day, this society is based on a legal set of rules that everyone tends to follow, particularly the important ones. That's the difference.
I know someone is going to bring up the topic of cops doing bad things. Guess what? There are bad cops, bad engineers, bad dentists and bad ice skaters. Humans are not a uniform blob of meat with the same brain. When someone behaves badly, more often than not, they face the consequences of their behavior. This includes violating others' rights.
I know that if you are not in the US the above can be incomprehensible. And that's OK, there's nothing I can say to make you see this realty. It's like a bird trying to explain to a fish what it is like to fly. The lack of context is too extreme.
Also:
> If we are going to talk about government derailing and doing as they wish then no piece of paper can protect anyone. At that point it becomes about guns and blood.
No, it doesn't, if there is sufficient consensus for authoritarianism. I mean, except for the few people who don't agree, maybe.
> That scenario is very, very far from reality in the US for more reasons than one.
That seems very naive to me if you look at all the efforts to undermine those rights, including by the president himself.
> The US is one of the few (well, I don't think I know of any other) where you can tell a police officer to go to hell and stop harassing you in a public space due to the rights recognized by the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution.
Then ... you are badly informed?
> That happens because, at the end of the day, this society is based on a legal set of rules that everyone tends to follow, particularly the important ones. That's the difference.
So ... you are agreeing then that it's about the consensus, not about the piece of paper?
> I know someone is going to bring up the topic of cops doing bad things. Guess what? There are bad cops, bad engineers, bad dentists and bad ice skaters. Humans are not a uniform blob of meat with the same brain. When someone behaves badly, more often than not, they face the consequences of their behavior. This includes violating others' rights.
And also, more often than not, they don't. But more importantly, you are making the argument against your original claim yourself here. What matters is the consensus, not the piece of paper. What matters is whether consequences are enforced on those who violate rights, not whether some piece of paper says "recognize" or "grant". What matters is whether society at large and government in particular consider those rights important or not, not whether some piece of paper says "recognize" or "grant".
> I know that if you are not in the US the above can be incomprehensible. And that's OK, there's nothing I can say to make you see this realty. It's like a bird trying to explain to a fish what it is like to fly. The lack of context is too extreme.
Erm ... yeah, sure! I gather that it is perfectly comprehensible to you what it is like to live anywhere else, though, right?
You still don't understand the key difference and I am not sure I can explain it well enough for you to internalize it.
That piece of paper and the words on it mean a lot.
They drive a massive legal system that takes that piece of paper and the words on it very seriously.
And so, if a bad politician, from the President on down to a local city official, a law enforcement person or any inhabitant of the US for that matter, behaves in a way that violates those words, the legal system makes them pay the consequences of their actions.
This does not mean that we are 100% infalible in this regard. Nobody is. There will be bad politicians, cops and people from time to time who will get away with misbehaving. That's just reality.
However, in the US, for the most part, these laws are respected AND enforced. They mean something and, in particular, the Bill of Rights exists outside of government. They can't take away your freedom of speech or engage in unreasonable search and seizure, etc. without suffering devastating legal consequences.
The only way this would not be so is if society as we know it in the US derailed to the point of anarchy. That is very far from reality. Impossible? Nothing is. Highly improbable? Absolutely. This isn't Venezuela. Yet.
I think OP didn’t mean to discuss the philosophical difference between grant and recognize though. Just that for each individual right, recognized or granted, we take a step away from totalitarianism on the spectrum of political freedom.
This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected. In the absence of such an arrangement the phrase "I have the right to do X" has as much meaning and validity as Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". It's not a wrong statement, it's just a completely semantically empty one.
> This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected.
The OP is clearly being sloppy with their word usage (and their all-caps usage), but I think what they may be trying to say is that the constitution generally prohibits the government from doing something, rather than granting an individual the right to do it.
For example, the first amendment doesn't say you have an affirmative right to free speech, just that "Congress shall make no law .. abridging the freedom of speech". Most constitutional "rights" are actually rules prohibiting the government from doing something (e.g., prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures).
On a practical level, the distinction may seem semantic, but there are important moral implications: all people inherently born free, and government/society restricts that freedom. Some of those restrictions are more acceptable than others, and that's what the constitution tries to delineate. If it was the reverse (i.e., the government granted you rights), then it would imply you were not free to do them in the first place.
Although the two approaches are similar on a practical level, the former approach emphasizes freedom to a greater degree.
All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.
Well humans don't live in traditional Darwinian nature, our brains have evolved beyond that. A key distinction between humans and animals is our ability to think and imagine. Freedom, at it's root, is based on the idea that people have an inherent right to "think" and believe.
If "thought" is an intrinsic right, then it follows that freedom to think should be protected. It further follows that to protect thought, we need to protect speech, religion, certain aspects of privacy (i.e., you can't freely think if you're constantly being watched). A whole moral code can be built from the basic concept of the right to think.
Sure there is! You are not prevented from grabbing a stick and defending yourself by some artifice. You might lose. Or win. And you are free to make that choice.
In CA if someone comes at me with a baseball bat and I have two sticks tied together with a short piece of rope to defend myself I can end-up in jail. I once asked a police officer friend (LAPD Commander, actually) what I could legally carry in Los Angeles to defend myself and not get into trouble. He said "your best pair of running shoes".
The whole thing is preposterous. What ends-up happening is that lots of people secretly conceal-carry because they don't want to be victims. They do the math and conclude they rather go to jail than be dead. Truly sad.
> Sure there is! You are not prevented from grabbing a stick and defending yourself by some artifice. You might lose. Or win. And you are free to make that choice.
> In CA if someone comes at me with a baseball bat and I have two sticks tied together with a short piece of rope to defend myself I can end-up in jail. I once asked a police officer friend (LAPD Commander, actually) what I could legally carry in Los Angeles to defend myself and not get into trouble. He said "your best pair of running shoes".
This is actually very sound advice and what you get told in every reasonable self-defense class. Carrying a weapon around is really more about satisfying some sense of self importance/illusion ("I could heroically defend myself, if I get attacked") than actual self defense. I remember doing that when I was 16 and feeling very tough, I've grown out of it.
> The whole thing is preposterous. What ends-up happening is that lots of people secretly conceal-carry because they don't want to be victims. They do the math and conclude they rather go to jail than be dead. Truly sad.
I was attacked by a thief with a knife when I was in my 20’s. This shit is real. Don’t generalize it to ascribe some kind of a Hollywood fantasy/caricature and intent.
Not every society allows it's members to be free.
In the US, the “right to bear arms” is a right to own a weapon as part of a “well-regulated militia”, with the idea that the nation was not originally intended to have a standing army, because it was believed that standing armies were a threat to the security of a “free State”.
It goes directly along with the third amendment against the quartering of soldiers in private houses.
A maximalist personal right to carry weapons everywhere all the time was invented post facto by gun manufacturers and pro-gun activists in the recent past. Notice that the same pro-gun activists are uninterested in the “well regulated” part, and are generally military enthusiasts uncritical of the most expensive and lethal standing army in the history of the world.
In "Heller" (2008), as the case is generally known, the US Supreme Court explored the history of the Second Amendment and established that it creates an INDIVIDUAL right not linked to a militia or army. This was confirmed once again by the US Supreme Court in another case in 2010.
There's a popular meme that involves cutting-up pieces of the Second Amendment to pull out, as you did, "right to bear arms" and "well-regulated militia" and then, Bob's your uncle, you can't have a gun. Everyone is a constitutional scholar. Well, that's not how it works.
While IANAL, I understand that these things are the result of a process of legal challenges and a lot of historical context. This question of the individual right is now very well established with, as far as I can tell, just a few corner cases. Thankfully laws are not interpreted by random people behind keyboards at random locations on the internet. They are the result of years of legal process, challenges and interpretation. The law, as it stands today, says you are wrong.
In other words, it is pretty much nonsensical to keep trying to contort the language and claim something exactly opposite what the US Supreme Court concluded in more than one recent review of the matter.
Here's a good article on the matter from Cornell Law School:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment
I have a lot of friends who are very passionate and well informed about this stuff. I've learned quite a bit over the years through conversations with them. For the most part what I have learned is that most people don't know what they are talking about when it comes to the US Constitution, the legal system, how government works and even what their rights actually mean.
It's a failure of, at a minimum, our educational system and, at the modern extremes, our inability to prevent the dissemination of false information. That's how you get ideas such as the "assault weapons ban" when any objective observer can easily --within 15 minutes or less-- of looking at the data, conclude that's as dumb as clipping your toe nails to cure cancer.
Solutions are only found if we explore reality, not fantasy.
In other words, nation-wide gun bans and confiscations are not the realm of reality. Therefore, it is pointless to go on and on about this nonsense. If we want to truly have an effect on gun violence we need to stop focusing on fantasy and face reality, which includes bad guys with guns and mentally disturbed guys with guns. The vast majority, the overwhelming majority of firearm owners would never hurt anyone. They are not the problem.
See, that’s the problem with gun haters, their solution is to mess with the rights of everyone. Let’s go! Let’s take that approach to everything. No more cars, knives, hammers, medicine, planes, trains, rocks, pressure cookers, chains, pieces of wood, ropes, etc. Let’s ban everything that could ever be used to harm anyone. For that matter, let’s castrate all men to prevent rape too.
At some point reason needs to prevail. The problem has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the brain. This is so irrefutable it’s silly.
Well, that's what they do!
How else do we decide then? Do I get to drive 150 miles per hour because I don't think the speed limit laws are factually correct? After all, I am quite capable, I have spent thousands of dollars learning and practicing race car driving and if I am on an absolutely empty road...
You can't pick and choose what laws you should obey. We are talking about rights here. The Bill of Rights for that matter. This isn't about where you should cross the street.
This is silly.
Look, the laws are what they are.
If you don't like them, go put your case in front of the SCOTUS and argue your point.
You're doing the exact same thing again of conflating an argument about fact with an argument about law.
If anything that’s more of an argument for constitutional gun ownership than against it.
That said, that does not mean we (or governments) do not regulate the rights, take your example of right to bear arms, you are not allowed to bear nuclear arms, or rocket launchers, so there is regulation.
Also, don’t fall into generalizations of “Americans” and the whole “greatest country in the world” meme. This isn’t Star Trek, where all Klingons are a uniform cultural and behavioral monoblock.
Fair enough though, so long as it's applied consistently.
I remember watching CNN in my hotel room in Munich the first time I traveled to Europe a few decades back. I was absolutely horrified. Seriously. I used to watch CNN almost exclusively here in the US. In case someone wants to come back with a Fox News comment, know that at the time FNN did not even exist (it came on air in 1996).
My first thought after watching CNN in my room in Europe was: Our enemies could not pay for better negative coverage of the US. I mean, it was horrible. Brutally negative. And very different from the CNN programming we were exposed to in the US. It made me realize why so many people had negative views of the US. Not the sole reason, of course, but this was quite shocking.
The other thing you have to realize in terms of the US is that this is far from a mono-cultural population, very far. There's tremendous cultural variety from coast to coast and north to south. And even within each region, cultures vary. I mean, just speaking of myself, while a US citizen, I come from both Latin American and Middle Eastern cultural backgrounds. By that I mean that I speak multiple languages, grew up in multiple cultures and feel at home in any of them.
And so, stereotyping Americans is, well, at the end of the day, fairly ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult but rather as a factual statement. Anyone who lumps "Americans" (as in the entire US population) under one category, culture or school of thought simply does not know what they are talking about.
Since we are talking about this, the term "American" sounds offensive (and ignorant) to a lot of people. How dare they call themselves "American"! That's a continent, not a country!
Well the name of the country is United States of America. In the case of Italy you can call yourself "Italian", France, "French", etc. What are you supposed to do with "United States of America"? Call yourself "United States-ian?". That's how you come to "American". This used to bother me until I understood where it came from and it made total sense.
BTW, there are other countries who do this kind of thing:
Mexico's official name is "Estados Unidos Mexicanos" or "United States of Mexico".
Brazil's official name is "República Federativa do Brasil" or "Federal Republic of Brazil"
In English we call them "Mexican" and "Brazilian" for short, just like people from the USA are called "American".
> And so, stereotyping Americans is, well, at the end of the day, fairly ignorant.
Any stereotyping is ignorant, and I'm sure you'd agree with that. Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Eastern European, Italian, Indian, Syrian, Computer Nerd, Musician, Redhead, Hipster, Bogan, Redneck, Boomer. No single word can encapsulate anything but one immediate descriptor of any individual.
This appears to be something that's been lost, and is only moving further away, in political discourse around the world, pandering to fear of stereotyped groups. And politicians only use it because it works. Sadly.
The psychoanalytical “father” is both good, and tyrannical, and i think part if its wisdom in that it manifests today as government and written ideal (where the ideal has power to reign in the government) is testament to our wisdom as a society.
The issue is how many roadblocks you have managed to embed into the public consciousness, not what the law says - laws, even constitutions, can be changed, and regularly are, or tends to be possible to circumvent in all kinds of ways.
The framing can make it politically harder, but only as long as the idea of the importance of a right remains embedded in the public view of the society they live in enough to make changing the law hard. I don't think whether the letter of the law suggest rights are granted vs. recognized matters all that much in practice with respect to that.
I think it's good to encourage people to see rights as inherent rather than granted, but I have no illusions that that means they can't still be taken away.
Not in a court of law, where it matters. We can be dismissive, but this distinction has true and legal significance. As I mentioned in one of my notes, this is the reason the government of New Zealand can decide to confiscate weapons while, in the US, it is so close to impossible that it is.
> laws, even constitutions, can be changed, and regularly are
Laws and the US Constitution are two different things.
The US Constitution can be changed, yes, but it virtually impossible. This is particularly true of REMOVING rights in the Bill of Rights.
In order to make any change you need --by law, as spelled out in the constitution:
2/3 majority vote in the US Senate.
AND
2/3 majority vote in the US House of Representatives.
AND
3/4 of State Legislatures approve it (via direct vote or ratifying convention).
2/3 of State Legislatures ask the US Congress (House and Senate) to hold a constitutional convention.
AND
3/4 of State Legislatures approve it (via direct vote or ratifying convention).
There's a practical element to this. Proponents of enhanced gun control (or gun confiscation) are wasting a ton of time, energy and money in an exercise in futility. It would be far more productive to focus on addressing the real causes of gun violence than to try and remove constitutional rights from people who have never and will never harm anyone.
Pretty much the entire thrust of what I wrote was about the legislative process, which makes what happens in a court irrelevant, as they are confined to interpret it.
> The US Constitution can be changed, yes, but it virtually impossible. This is particularly true of REMOVING rights in the Bill of Rights.
The US constitution has been changed on a regular basis. To me the number of substantial changes shows that it is not "virtually impossible", but of course you're free to have an interpretation of "virtually impossible" that is different from mine.
= no shirt (or just a singlet?)
Bear arms = wander around with weapons. (Alternatively, have [black|brown|polar|panda] bears for your upper limbs/arms?)
I love English.
I think the point he was making is that the default government is an ethical state of absolute tyranny: all of your natural rights are subservient to the state. In this sense, the rights are carved out of the government, even if they are natural rights.
America is not even close to North Korea in relation to human rights and freedoms, and I feel no source is required as this is just hyperbole.
Edit add words.
"The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution places restrictions on the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent, forbidding the practice in peacetime."
Because of the lack of any prior Third Amendment jurisprudence, this decision established three important holdings not previously articulated: (1) that the National Guardsmen qualify as soldiers under the Third Amendment; (2) that the Third Amendment applies to state as well as federal authorities, i.e., is incorporated against the states; and (3), that the protection of the Third Amendment extends beyond home owners, that is, those only with a fee simple arrangement, but includes anyone who, within their residence, has a legal expectation of privacy and a legal right to exclude others from entry into the premises.[1] The majority held that the correctional officers' occupancy in the rooms was covered under the legal rules of "tenancy" and was therefore protected under the Third Amendment.
Basically, the state kicked striking prison guards out of their employee benefit housing for national guard troops to use while the national guard was used for overseeing the prison.
Nixon started “the war on drugs”, and it looks like they didn’t try to use that as a defense.
Is that settled? Just because they didn't use it in the past doesn't mean they won't try in the future.
Things are going on right now in Washington that are completely unprecedented up to this point.
What caselaw defines 'at war' as it pertains to the third?
Leaving the technical details aside such as the fact that it's not possible to have a "secure backdoor" that won't ultimately be used by the (other) "bad guys", this is important because they make it seem as if this is the only way they'd ever use this power -- with a warrant.
And THAT is beyond FALSE and a BIG FAT LIE, and they know it. Watch Bush's speech about the Patriot Act when he signed it. He said the bill will be used to "read the terrorists' emails" and other digital communications. Now we know that in 97-99% of the cases, the Patriot Act is used for crimes other than terrorism, usually drug related. But the FBI also absolutely loves to abuse the National Security Letters for at least half of their data requests to big data companies. And the best part is those come with gag orders so the public will almost never find out about those requests.
Worse yet, since these were past, these powers were further expanded, usually days before Christmas, so now the FBI gets access to RAW internet data just like only the NSA did previously. So does DEA, and about 15 other agencies. No warrant needed, for just about any crime they'd like to investigate.
And you can bet this is their plan with the encryption backdoors, too. I guarantee it. They'll continue to talk in public about warrants and how they will only use it with a warrant, and then somehow the bill will be written to include all sorts of ways for them to access the encrypted data WITHOUT a warrant.
Even when the criticism against a surveillance bill is very strong, they still somehow end-up "compromising" by only getting warrantless access in "emergency situations" (where emergency isn't defined too specifically) or for "serious crimes" (often not well defined in the bill either). Or they manage to sneak a serious crimes "and other type of crimes" in there, too, as they've done in some bills in the past.
So let's not be naive with the whole "warrantproof" talking point. They're trying to distract and mislead us. Ultimately, even if the bill is very specific about a warrant, they just know they can expand it later after one or two renewals, as they've done with FISA 702 to now give other federal agencies much of the same data access NSA gets, even though that wasn't supposed to be the original plan at all.
My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps more true now than ever in history.
So why is it that there is so much support for tough-on-crime policies that decrease popular freedom in obvious ways? Why does it seem like the less people are affected by crime, the more they abhor it and feel the need to root it out to the last, no matter the cost? There are diminishing returns here. The price we pay to track down the last criminal on Earth will be _everything_.
No one likes to say this but your average citizen is either not smart enough or doesn't care enough to understand statistics... so sensationalism wins.
It makes a false binary distinction and real world decisions are more complicated.
It actually isn't, it's a snippet of a greater dialogue with often taken out of context in order to to infer precisely the opposite meaning of what was intended[0,1].
Ben Franklin understood the nuance and complexity of the real world better than many of the libertarians and ancaps who quote him..
[0]https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...
[1]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62668/6-ben-franklins-gr...
They say that the origin is not what people think?
Many of the founding fathers had slaves. Doesn't make the constitution any less valid. Mel Gibson is a terrible person but Braveheart is an amazing movie.
The origin of something does not discredit its ideas.
This argument is dismissive without actually addressing the argument.
It's literally a logical fallacy called 'appeal to the stone'.
Where's the nuance?
The difference between who you're being made 'safe' from and who is being repressed is merely a labeling issue, and its the same forces that do the repression that keep the safety.
You could be the one being protected one one day, then the next day, you're the 'Native American' and the one others need safety from, because a label changed.
Freedom fighter or a terrorist? Speaking up for what you believe or spouting anti-government propaganda?
That concept is what the quote is conveying.
It's a very powerful and important quote that applies to numerous situations.
That's why it's a fricking timeless quote. Insane this isn't agreed upon by everyone.
What does "deserve" mean in this slogan? Are people who made a strategic mistake undeserving of fair treatment? This sounds a lot like the con artist's rationale that his victims had it coming because they were stupid.
Also, which liberties are considered essential? What kind of safety are we talking about? If a mugger threatens you maybe you should cooperate? Should people on the losing side of a war always fight to the end? If you think the police are corrupt and you won't get a fair trial, should you allow yourself to be arrested?
I don't believe there is a simple slogan that tells you what to do in all situations.
There isn’t a meaningful in between.
Modern encryption is, eventually, either effectively unbreakable, or effectively worthless.
Or is there widespread knowledge of exploits that can recover, say, 25% of a plaintext reliably, but no more?
If I make an encrypted phone call to you, there are a few "levels" of information. There's the exact information exchanged on the call, the amount of information exchanged but not it's value, the identities of those in the call, the date and time and duration of the call, perhaps the hardware used to make the call, etc...
Encryption isn't an all or nothing thing, it often involves tradeoffs and giving up some security for convenience or the other way around. And in some areas there are laws about what must be kept secret and what must be visible to the government (like in anti-money laundering laws).
Personally I agree with you. Crime is a risk we need to take, just like driving a car or crossing the road. My guess is that even in North Korea despite their Stasi on steroids system. So...
But Barr would say that is about to change, meaning you'll be affected more by crime, unless cops can access encrypted communications.
I don't particularly fear a car accident, even though it's far and away the most likely thing to cause me physical injury. Several of my family and friends have been in car accidents, most are just fine. My chance of being awakened and assaulted by a burglar are unfathomably more remote, I've only ever come across it in movies.
As a result, I have a strong emotional reaction to the 0.001% chance of a breaking and entering and a weaker reaction to the 10% chance of a car accident. But I don't naturally want to spend a proportional amount on a safer car, I'm more inclined buy motion-activated floodlights.
If we lived in a lawless Wild West, I think we'd be more inured to the possibility of crime. Now that it's mostly a foreign experience it's easier to respond with fear instead of reason.
This statement is shocking to me. I guess that you intend to say people are rarely the direct individual victim of petty street crime e.g. robbing, assault, etc?
At this moment there is a thread on the front page pertaining to the widespread problem of fraudulent listings on Amazon. This kind of fraud is affecting people near-universally. It affects my decision making process every time I shop.
Corporate criminals who cheat pollutant emissions regulations affect my life with literally every breath I take.
For instance, consider Mexican organized crime (cartels). Cartels wield a huge amount of illicit influence and generally make everyone's lives much worse, but most people aren't being kidnapped or confronted by cartels on a daily basis. Their lives are certainly affected by them, but in mostly indirect ways.
Cancerous organized crime and its enablement by coerced and voluntary corruption within Government and business represents an existential threat to developed societies. Many of us take for granted our nation's peace and prosperity, in spite of the creeping threat of organized crime and corruption being ever present.
Law enforcement not being able to access encrypted data severely limits our ability to prosecute and convict criminals who use these secure communications to conduct their business, and brings the creeping threat of social decay ever closer.
The impact of organized crime pales in comparison to that of authoritarian regimes. The "creeping threat of social decay" argument gives me chills; it's exactly the slogan I imagine at the head of the movement that finally ends democracy.
So while you speculate on some made up authoritarian movement subverting democracy in America, I look on in horror as democracy in Mexico is being subverted in real time by organized crime and the creeping social decay and corruption that comes with it. 100 politicians assassinated in a single year!
This is happening right across our border and if not for our robust law enforcement both at the border and throughout the country, it would be much worse here too. That is what I fear, and it is why I don't want criminals to be able to hide behind encryption.
Everything good in our society comes from law and order. Without it, there is only chaos and destruction.
Basically, I'm not sure you've correctly mapped your desired outcomes onto the policies you advocate. The things you're arguing for don't appear to help with the problem that scares you.
Doesn't most available data indicate it is moving in the opposite direction and that people's perception are biased by the 24 hour news cycle which leads people to think crime has gotten worse?
Frequent problems are invisible. Rare problems are news.
There was a time when it made sense, and now it's driven by other forces (nation scale emotions?)
Irrational overprotection such as feel good tough on crime is popular. Were as, more abstract measures which would actual ell but aren't directly relatable to threatening your child are not.
A standard answer:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
~ H.L. Mencken
from
https://www.peakprosperity.com/2019-year-in-review-part-1/#c...
Politicians realised the "benefits" of this long ago, stoking the fires of rage, whipping people up into a frenzy, all to "keep them safe".
And so a large slice of the population really believes there are terrorists and criminals lurking around every corner - that things have never been more dangerous; and so they allow politicians to strip their freedoms and gain sweeping powers, because its all to "keep them safe".
"I understand they need to spy on people but not too much"
They don't NEED to spy on people and we have yet to see numbers and actual proof they use the data they collect to actually find terrorists / pedophile / whatever the new trend will be to remove freedom and privacy from the population.
Comment #1:
> This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the government mandates.
Comment #2:
> Encryption is an issue that Congress needs to resolve. However, there has not been any leadership on this issue for several decades. Apparently, there is no lobby and fundraising money to be made by either party and it does not win any votes, so Congress is not interested. Until the leadership vacuum in Congress is resolved this problem and many others will not go away.
It's obvious where Barr falls:
> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved?
Maybe we should be teaching this stuff in high school. The pseudocode for RSA is like twelve lines. Outlawing it is not practical.
IE, yes, it's impossible but that still doesn't mean they keep trying harder and harder and more and more destructively.
The "I don't care how cryptography works, why can't we just have a backdoor?" crowd is imagining that a magical piece of "common sense" legislation is capable of solving this problem. Yes, they can pass something, but it isn't going to work.
Because two days after it passes, they'll have courts full of obstinate people who refuse to provide keys for their homebrew encrypted messaging systems. Sure, you can jail them indefinitely, but that just highlights how obviously unsolved the problem remains.
Marijuana use is something thousands (millions?) of people have had jail time or other significant repercussions that have negatively impacted their life.
If encryption is outlawed, I see no reason why jails wouldn’t fill up if people started wrapping their own backdoor-less crypto around whatever else is used.
What is the problem they're trying to solve? They claim to want a "reveal secrets" button, but for any determined person or for any secret of consequence, the button won't work.
Yes, jails will fill up, war-on-drugs style, but my argument is that filling up jails isn't a good goal given what they claim they wait. So my only conclusion is that they're either lying about what they want, or they're idiots. Both seem plausible.
Everyone knows how to strangle someone. Every one can trivially learn what to use to poison someone. Murder is still illegal.
We outlaw things we don't want to happen.
If we don't want privacy. We should outlaw encryption. If we do want privacy, encryotion must remain legal.
While I think there are significant arguments against encryption, this one doesn't make sense to me because laws can stop widespread usage even if they cannot eliminate it. I would draw a comparison to other forms of illegal data that even today cannot be stopped, but which have resulted in far less usage and industrial support.
Translation (also this can be viewed as a resume for entire article): The powers in charge are pissed off because they lost a tiny percent of their control and want it back.
Was the pre-telephone and pre-microphone era some kind of lawless hell on earth where law enforcement was completely helpless to do anything?
How? By decreeing that use of encryption is evidence of guilt?
Cryptographic software is protected under the 1st amendment.
https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato-sauce-p...
this is encryption export ban 2.0
https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are-failed-t...
Then he can get the pols to push the ever popular "for the children" narrative and have legislation slipped through the child protection act bill to mandate backdoors to encryption.
> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved?
So, Barr wanted to know why "not been solved"?
It's simple, really just dirt simple: All the king's horses and all the king's men mostly can't hope to factor an integer of a few thousand digits into a product of prime numbers. For some more, there are some good means of generating prime numbers of at least hundreds of digits that can be multiplied to give numbers of thousands of digits with prime factors of hundreds of digits.
Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's possible to construct public key infrastructures. The math and corresponding source code became readily available.
So, now anyone can construct relatively solid means of communicating digital information that only intended persons can decrypt and read.
This has been the situation since Rivest, Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),
Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996.
etc.
In particular, some gang can have their own software that they wrote themselves and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc.
So, as in Schneier's book, that has been the situation back to before 1996.
LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff and much more since 1996 quite well!
So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at least since 1996?
I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has been given a clear, solid, fully authoritative briefing by some world class experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So, maybe this WSJ article was exaggerating?
Here is a point about the past: Just for relaxation, say, when some code that should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some old movies. Some of these are cinema noir of crime dramas. In general it's interesting to use those old movies to get insight into what US pop culture was like, and how different it was from the present, those several decades ago.
In particular it gets really surprising how in those movies the police struggled terribly when current technology -- DNA matching, cameras, facial recognition, and much more -- would have made their work much easier!
So, if Apple wants to use unbreakable encryption to sell smartphones, around the world, the police might have to return to some of the techniques in those old movies!
One would think he would want to not let goverment have this power, but, well, perception of things depend on where you sit. Right now he sits in the WH.