Comment by jamilbk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamilbk | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, another feel-good law being proposed with no consideration for second or third order effects.

Tech companies would be required to police their systems for this data. There’s no good automated way to do this, so an army of compliance workers would be needed if you have a non-trivial amount of content on your platform. For small tech companies, this would be prohibitively expensive.

Then there’s the 800lb gorilla in the room: the encryption issue. How can a company police its content if it doesn’t know what it is? Are we really suggesting that every end-to-end encryption technology be nuked in favor of “saving the children?” How many children will it really save? And how many others will it endanger in oppressive, dictatorial regimes? Not to mention the myriad other criminals seeking to exploit unencrypted and non-private technologies?

This is akin to vehicle manufacturers being required to monitor the audio of vehicle occupants at all times in case a rape occurs.

“Think of the children.” This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It’s disgusting.

I’m counting the days until Feinstein leaves office. EARN IT causes more harm than good.

Politicians like this never seem to understand that when I strongly oppose their position and challenge the law they want to pass, I am thinking of the children.

In particular, I don't want the next generation to grow up in an authoritarian surveillance state, where thought-crime is punishable, deviation from conventional wisdom is an anomaly to be corrected, and these punishments and corrections are mostly enforced automatically by some impersonal system where no-one in power has any real responsibility or accountability for the effect they have on other people's lives.

The things that happen to some children are awful, and of course any decent human being wants to see them stopped and to see the people who would do them kept away from those they would harm. However, these events are not the only important factor here. We need a rational, considered position on the issues as a whole, not an extreme position based on one emotionally-charged issue and the near-exclusion of all other considerations.

If you pare it back to the basics; the government has two actual powers:

1) Send in the police and have people imprisoned 2) Send in the army and have people killed

In practice they have a lot of much softer options because they leverage the basic powers into more subtle ones, but government is fundamentally about who controls the army and the police. Feinstien, like all people in the US Congress, has made decisions that ultimately involve some really, truly horrible outcomes for other people. She lives in a world where horrible things do have to happen sometimes to keep order, even in the more optimistic models of government.

It is unlikely, so say the least, that the implications around civil liberties escape any long-serving politician. The enforcement of laws necessarily sits on the edge of abusing civil liberties. It is more likely she just doesn't want to talk about that.

3) Fine you with some made up sum. If you don't pay, you lose you credit score, your home and everything else.

This is rarely applied to members of the government, the rich or corporations. It is the favorite instrument to keep the middle class work horses under control.

And how will the government deal with a fine non-payer who keeps their wealth in physical form? Say they have no money in the bank but keep gold bars in a stack under their bed. They barter for everything they need.

At some point it devolves to burly men with or without guns making people do things. Or women in this enlightened age. In practice it hopefully isn't a common thing but there has to be a level of physical compulsion backing up everything that communities don't enforce among each other anyway. A major job of people in Congress is to work out exactly what does happen when people refuse to comply and at some point it gets physical (quite quickly if someone is really bent on being uncooperative). Issues like that would be close to the top of every politicians's mind.

It is possible to confiscate physical wealth if it's "assumed" to be obtained by illegal means.

> Are we really suggesting that every end-to-end encryption technology be nuked in favor of “saving the children?”

Yes. Their goal is to nuke encryption. The children are a red herring. This is solely about government power.

>Yes. Their goal is to nuke encryption

Who is "they"? Are you talking about the deep state?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deep_state

> A large group of people, typically members of government agencies and the military, believed to have long-lasting political influence that is difficult for an administration voted into power to counter. [from 1990s]

United States law enforcement doesn't have the greatest track record of not blackmailing people. Or not shooting the wrong person and their dog for good measure.

If you want to call the FBI, NSA, and CIA the "deep state" go ahead. They have real names though and aren't secretive about their desire to make (end to end) encryption illegal.

While the deep state as a scholarly concept does not require secrecy, this bill certainly uses deception to manipulate the public, and did not originate with Representative Feinstein's local constituency as evidenced by the overwhelming opposition.

>A deep state can also take the form of entrenched career civil servants acting in a non-conspiratorial discretionary manner to further their agency mission

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state

The question I wish would be asked is "should the deep state (CIA, NSA etc) be influencing the legislative process to the point of overriding the concerns of voters?"

This is pretty funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state#Differences_from_sc...

As generally used, the term "deep state" refers to career officials acting in opposition to the democratically-elected leadership of a country.

In this case, the elected officials are completely in accord with the desires of the security/intelligence agencies.

No. Their goal is to protect the children. They don't understand technology and do not care how many enterprises are destroyed by their clumsy fumbling. Stop trying to reframe stupidity as conspiracy.

"Conspiracy" makes it sound like the US government hasn't been building the largest spying apparatus in history over the past 2 decades. Reality says otherwise.

And Feinstein has always been on the side of surveillance, except of course when she is affected:

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/13/politics/feinstein-cia-sn...

If Congress were serious about "protecting children", there are many other things they would do before focusing on the boogeyman of online pedophilia. I already mentioned child health care in another comment; you could also think of social/public housing for destitute parents of children; food security, which _is_ a problem in the US (and the programs are being cut); minimum wage increase; free child-care for working parents etc.

Has Senator Feinstein been promoting any of this?

Those are all massively expensive ideas, EARN it isnt. Just because these senators haven't been able to enact some of your other ideas doesn't mean they aren't serious about protecting children. At least some of the senators behind EARN it are in favor of expanding social welfare programs [0] - its just politically difficult to get traction on new laws with huge costs attached to them.

[0] https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/

1. Diane Feinstein isn't in favor of those things, and this is who we're talking about.

2. The party platform? Really? After the last primary cycle, Sanders was allowed influence over that document, improving it somewhat. Are party elected officials bound by it? was Clinton? Is Biden?

2. "In favor" for a Senator or Congressperson must mean: Propose it, speak about in in the Senate, speak about it in the media, support civic organizations campaigning for it, and don't be dependent on donors who want it not to happen.

They have made it abundantly clear that they don't give a fuck about the children in so many ways it isn't funny. They are more willing to give free lunch to contractors than schoolchildren.

Yeap. Clipper chip 2.0. The ruling elite doesn't want us "plebs" to have any privacy in order to make mass surveillance easier and to be able to exploit pilfered details to silence and defeat their enemies. It strikes me as inverted totalitarianism about to give way to direct totalitarianism.

Think of the children fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

We could have had Kevin de Leon. It was actually closer than I expected.

So, US people will not allow EU citizens onto their websites because cookie/GDPR pain, and EU websites will ban US citizens because we want small companies to still be able to build platforms without enough knowledge about building an AI police. The internet started out nice a long long time ago ;)

I disagree.

The web has been lawless since forever. Conventions have been established and reinforced by the big players to their profit. They now buy politicians like any other big, bad rent-seeker.

The total lack of sensible, restrained legislation is how we got a surveillance state and a turnkey fascist police-state, Stasi-like enforcement.

The lawless web never cared about that. Still doesn't. But yeah we used to "feel different" about that lawlessness. John Perry Barlow's big "world f.off and leave us" statement seems different now the NSA said sure, and bugged literally everyone because no consequences. With the assistance of google, Apple, ms because path of least resistance means what you think and you do not matter. At all. Yay lawless, huh?

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