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Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

Maybe generalize that further, a right to privacy.

Perhaps, but see Article 8 which is cited in your sibling comment. It already contains a right to privacy.

But the term privacy is not very rigid. It can be taken and interpreted in various ways. It's certainly a good thing to mention it, but encryption needs to be mentioned explicitly, spelled out even.

There cannot be any room for interpretation: citizens have a right to encrypt their communication, end-to-end with their intended party.

That still leaves too much room for interpretation (namely, quibbling over the definitions of "encrypt" or "end-to-end").

People have a right to encrypt their communication, end-to-end with their intended participants, such that no one other than their intended participants can decrypt any aspect of their communication.

I agree. Your expanded definition is better. Now let's flesh it out into a full-fledged proposal, put it up on a website and disseminate it among the people. Let's get it into the parliaments as something that the parliament members have to discuss and finally either accept or reject.

Let's give them a good fight.

> Let's give them a good fight.

Possibly the wrong goal.

How about "Let's win." instead? :)

You're right. You can tell this topic makes my blood boil, unfortunately.

I'm all for it, but I don't think posting it on a website is going to suffice. Get the EFF behind it, get others experienced with lobbying behind it, then it might get some momentum.

What about this tech-agnostic version: citizens have a right to deprive the unrelated citizens from accessing their communications using any means. Note that this includes E2E encryption, whisper, face-to-face private conversation, rubberhose encryption, noise insertion and steganography all in one.

I like this "right to deprive" wording and toyed with it myself. Reminds me of the way DMCA anti-circumvention works. Perhaps we could call this the anti-snooping right.

Anti-snooping would be much more useful than anti-circumvention in fact.

Some idiot will cut off someones ears and then say to the police that, "it was to deprive him of accessing our communications by using any means. It says so in the law, Sir!"

It would still be criminal on the grounds of breaking the bodily integrity, which is an infringement of someone else's life and health, which is normally considered more protected than privacy.

I think you underestimate the amounts of rain dance magic lawyers can produce with wording like "using any means." ;)

We already have a right for privacy in the EU. That's why the EU court has declared mass logging of meta data by ISPs and mobileproviders illegal.

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