It's very simple. The powers that be just want to break encryption, but only for law enforcement use.
Simple.
Uggg.
Simple.
Uggg.
Right now China is engaging in textbook "secret war" with Hong Kong as well as a variety of other human rights abuses. It used to be that we, the U.S., could speak up, and have dozens of allies rush to our side on the principle that we are to be trusted. Consider how shoddy the evidence for justifying Iraq was, and the fact that most countries still chose to send their troops with ours. Our word used to mean something.
But now? How can we hold a higher ground than China when our own police forces use the very same tactics against our own protesters? How can we accuse the other side of building concentration camps when we have our own?
Backdooring encryption is just another attack on our basic freedoms. It is crazy that at a time we should be touting our values as proof they are objectively better compared to our competitors', we are also trying to take them apart and bring us down to the same level as our competitors. It's like a vast cargo ship encountering a dinghy, and the captain tells the dinghy "you need to change your construction materials, you're shooting yourself in the foot by making poor choices" while his crewmen are hard at work drilling holes into the windows below deck.
But we’ve had things like this for a long time. The police have acted like they do for generations, we had concentration camps for Japanese people during World War II, and we’ve always done a variety of other reprehensible things (propping up brutal dictators, destroying native civilizations, institutional racism of every possible flavor.) Frankly, I’m shocked that our word ever meant something.
I study WW2, and it's important to be factual.
The correct term is internment camps. Japanese-Americans usually lost their property, but the purpose was to locate them in central locations, not to re-educate or liquidate them, as our enemies did to the Allies.
For that time in history, it could be argued that the decision made sense. Japanese subs did shell the US mainland, and Japanese-Americans in Hawaii did help a Japanese aircrew try to escape after Pearl Harbor. Japan planned to return to Hawaii after Midway to occupy Hawaii.
I think using the term "moral high ground" is not helpful for a number of reasons. However, the US did rebuild the world economy after WW2, mostly to prevent it from becoming aligned with the Soviet Union. Most of the world's national borders are descended from WW2.
As leading historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson says, "[WW2 was German and Japanese soldiers machine-gunning unarmed civilians by the tens of millions.]"
There were separate death camps (sometimes combined) that involved direct train-to-killing-field pipelines, and most concentration camps involved work in horrible conditions, but that's because of further goals above relocation.
We have a nasty habit of creating scenarios where death is an inevitable consequence without it being the official policy.
This could be investigated further; was the average length of imprisonment less than a year, were the causes of death different than in the larger population, did economic conditions and racism increase the base death rate among Japanese-Americans in the first place, was the age distribution different among those the US bothered to move to camps, pushing their base rate lower?
Evidently people died because of these camps, and it is incredibly likely that many of those deaths were racist hate crimes committed by US employees on US citizens. Even that aside, it was very much wrong it imprison innocent civilians on the basis of their race. 'Thousands died' does seem like a substantial overstatement when the only number I can find is less than 2,000 (it's from the US, so it may be biased). Probably a few hundred died as a result of these camps, mostly from disease.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/516277507...
I'm not pedantically quibbling over whether it was 1980 or 2000 who died. I'm saying that if you took a random sample of 120,000 people at the beginning of 1943 and checked back at the end, 1,300-1,400 would have died. That leave hundreds, not thousands, who died in internment that wouldn't have died otherwise. These are arguable numbers, as I stated above, but they have more substance than I think you're implying.
Additionally, the US invested considerable resources into keeping these people alive. There were on-site hospitals, and not like the ones in Auschwitz where people were held until they died. These camps shouldn't have existed, but they were completely different animals from death camps and are not just a step away.
I’d be interested to know how many of the 120k were released. And of those who died, who many died “on parole.”
During the Gulf War (1992) the UK interned Iraqi citizens in the UK, just as they did with German citizens in WWII.
That was not a step away from mass murder.
This is the same rhetorical slight-of-hand people use to ignore Guantanamo. One tends to learn more about the speaker than the topic.
The problem is that these words have taken on entirely different meanings that perhaps what they once meant and there are those who take advantage of that disparity. When people hear about concentration camps, they think death camps, even if that isn't specifically what the word once meant.
There are many such ways to twist words like this and rarely do I find them being used for positive reasons. It is like when someone lists all the large name chemicals in a vaccine. They might be factually correct, but what is the chance they are doing that to scare people who have a misunderstanding of chemicals thinking that large name means harmful chemical?
It doesn't change the part where concentration camps were modeled after British and US approaches of dealing with "undesirables"
As a classicist he's tolerable, if no more than that; in any century where the years count up instead of down, the man seems entirely at sea.
The U.S. had a global nuclear monopoly for several years. It didn’t abuse it. That’s a hell of a high ground.
Using a new weapon to end an existing war is one thing. Using a new weapon to start new wars is another. That delineation is independent of one's judgement of the weapon per se. They're both bad. But one is worse than the other.
The U.S. had the opportunity to go on a mission of global military conquest. There was military support for nuclear war with Russia and China. The United States didn't do that, and I think that's a unique and admirable trait.
Yes, using nukes defensively is less bad than using it to start a war. That doesn’t mean I support the use of nukes.
WWII was unique in starting with no nukes and ending with them. We also didn't yet understand the long-term ramifications of the weapon's use.
After the failure of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of of WW1, resulting in WW2, the Allies learned that unconditional surrender was needed to prevent future wars.
The Japanese military command preferred that their troops never surrender.
So the 2 options the US had were:
1) Curtis LeMay would use 10,000 bombers to napalm those cities, and every last village in Japan.
2) Use 2 nuclear weapons and demand a surrender. The military commanders in Washington debated the ethics of using such weapons, so this wasn't done lightly.
Having studied this over a period of years, #2 makes the most sense to me.
And Japan and the Soviet Union had been at each others throats since before there was a Soviet Union and Japan thumped the tsar.
I am sure Japan did not want to surrender under a Soviet flag that was looking for 50 years of retribution.
In a strange way it was an American coup to get peace signed before Russia started stripping the place down to the bone.
It could also be argued that it made sense to do the same for Germans since we had a minority of Germans siding with Hitler and even holding Nazi rallies before we got involved in WWII. We weren't exactly good arbiters of fairness when it came to race either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_8802
Note that in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were a significant portion of the local population, about one-third. Of the 150k+ Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii, only 1,200 to 1,800, or about 1%, were interned. On the mainland US where they were a smaller portion of the population, far more Japanese Americans were interned. This discrepancy probably comes down to a matter of practicality again; one third of the population is just too many to intern.
Anti-German sentiment was certainly present in America and the UK during the world wars. In response to Anti-German sentiment, the British royal family anglicized their name during WWI, changing it from House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to House of Windsor. In America, German Americans largely stopped speaking German in public (German was the second most common language in America and was spoken particularly often in Pennsylvania, remnants of which can still be seen today in "Pennsylvanian Dutch" culture.) However, treating German Americans as severely as Japanese Americans were treated, at least on the mainland, was probably too impractical to be considered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans#The_apparent_...
Internet was a tool that allowed all sides to be equally heard (the fact that it was abused to disseminate fake news supports that claim even more), so only now it's too obvious what's going on.
Oh, and other governments and organizations are catching up quickly with the same practice.
It's called having protestors in the first place. China wouldn't let you hear about it, or all you get is distorted information, which means you don't know what's going on in their society.
> They absolutely are allowed.
So you and I can go to tiananmen square tomorrow for a healthy protest and drum circle?
Ie “It would be a shame if something were to happen to your business model here.”